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Book reviews for "Janson-Smith,_Celina" sorted by average review score:

Celine: The Authorized Biography
Published in Paperback by Dundurn Press, Ltd. (1999)
Authors: Georges-Herbert Germain, Georges-Hebert Germain, and David Homel
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Wonderful collaboration between artist and writer!
Georges Herbert-Germain does a wonderful job finding the equilibrium between Céline's public stage-life and her emotional private-life. The book's chapter pattern of singer to woman to singer shows that there's more to Céline Dion than being a diva and an international pop icon. Despite being followed by the media since she was 12, Céline appears to have remained grounded in the stories of her past, present, and what she plans to do in the future. There's more behind this diva besides Titanic and pipes of platinum.

A book of love, music, talent & family values
I have read this book umpteen times now! It was a great gift I recieved 2 Christmases ago. Celine's book enchants me with her story of family values, right from the start. This young woman's career has been what you'd call an "amazing triumph". Celine's author writes of the Dion family's pride for their sibling. The most touching part of the book has to be the 1st. This is where the Dion clan forms. We read about how Celine's mom & dad meet, and how they never fail to support their huge family.

Each section of the book has a bunch of great, moving photos, following Celine down her long road to success. Each photo tells her story in chronological order. It makes me think of a blossoming flower, going from stage to stage.

There is also a story of what Celine has done, in preparation of her "Falling into you" tour. Georges Hebert tells the every stress Celine has felt on given days. I was amazed about how she is so loved in foreign countries. The book has skyrocketed into great success, either in french or english. I am looking forward to buying her latest book. My likes for her are not finished, even though she is on her sabbatical.

Buy the book and read it carefully. It's the type of book you won't put down! Did my review help you?

Bravo!
No word can truly discribe Celine's wonderful voice, dreams and spirit, but I believe this book has managed to do the best it could. Of course, you cannot feel Celine's passion by simply read a book. However, I can ensure you that after reading this book, you must at least start to like this real-life model of human being -- Celine Dion.


Celine Dion
Published in Hardcover by Friedman/Fairfax Publishing (1999)
Author: Marianne McKay
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Beautiful pictures unseen elsewhere
Book is printed professionally, just like the pictures. You will find over 100 pictures of Céline Dion, sometimes with stars like Carole King, David Foster and Peabo Bryson. Captions are succinct without needless verbose descriptions. I particularly like the last few pictures which were taking more recently as Céline truely looked much better in. Not to say she's ugly when she was young, but in fact she has grown to look more sophisticated and elegant. One of the most celebrated of our modern artists... Perhaps one look at her you'll know what her vocals are made of :o) Buy the book! It's worth more than US$7.99.

It was great!!!!
Thsi book is terrific. It has great pictures of Celine, and any fan of hers would buy it!!

This Book is the Best!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
OK if u r a Celine fan as big as me get this book it is so good! It told some interesting facts and the pictures i had never seen any so cool. Don't take my word for it just buy it it is well worth the money and the wait to recieve it. this is the best book i have EVER read!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Celine Dion (Real-Life Reader Biography)
Published in Library Binding by Mitchell Lane Publishers, Inc. (1998)
Author: Melanie Cole
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A very good book to learn about Celine
If you want to read a book to give you just the right amount of Celine detail, you should read this book. Fans probably know most of the info in this book, but you can always know more. The pics are obviously beautiful and the author has a good point in writing...

Very well done!
I loved this book! It was amazing how Celine went from being part of a poor family in Quebec to being where she is today. It was a great story to read and seemed really well-researched. I'd recommend that any Celine fan buy this book!


Conversations with Professor y
Published in Paperback by Books on Demand (1986)
Author: Louis-Ferdinand D. Celine
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To the Skies...!
In 1944, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the author of the novels ''Journey to the End of the Night'' and ''Death on the Installment Plan,'' fled his native France. In the preceding decade he had written pamphlets blaming the impending war on industrialists, literary figures, politicians and Jews. His anti-Semitism became increasingly virulent, when the Occupation years ended in 1945 he went into exile in Denmark, where he was imprisoned for over a year for collaborating with the Nazis. Given amnesty by France in 1951, Celine returned, and found that his work was largely ignored.

In ''Conversations with Professor Y'' he set out to restore his reputation as an innovative literary stylist. The book appears here in English for the first time, alongside the French text, in a solid translation. Professor Y is a fictional foil for the author's digs at formal literature, and much of ''Conversations'' is hilarious. Celine is self-mocking as he tries to get his name back into circulation. He compares an eager genius to the new Big Bubbly soap product, is adamant in his revulsion at the ascendancy of ideas over emotion and is passionate in his desire to capture the immediacy of conversation on the page. ''The emotion of spoken language through the written form! Just reflect on that a bit, dear Professor Y! get your noodle in gear!'' Poor Professor Y! This dull academician (whose most intelligent comment is ''Why, holy moly! you're afloat in dialectics!'') is led on a dizzying tour of Paris, overwhelmed by a crazed author who claims he's on the brink of a revelation just when the professor expresses a need to find a bathroom. ''Conversations''is essential for Celine fans, and a good, if tame, introduction for the uninitiated.

A Style MisRepresented
Conversations is an easy and short read...in the text we find Celine describing his 'style'--the "emotive subway" as he called it...there are funny episodes and attacks on publishers and whoever gets in his way, I would recommend it along with 'Mea Culpa'...one can gather what Celine was composed of more with insights such as this!...


London Bridge
Published in Paperback by Dalkey Archive Pr (1999)
Authors: Dominic Di Bernardi, Louis-Ferdinand D. Celine, and Dominic Di Bernardi
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A Maxwell's Demon on the brink of collapse.
'London Bridge' continues the misadventures of Ferdinard, anti-hero of 'Guignol's Band' and altar-ego of Celine. Exiled in the London underworld during the Great War, having served at the front and been decorated for bravery, a shellshocked Ferdinand, shrapnel in his brain, prone to fits and blackouts and a gammy left arm, on the run after the violent death of an associate, has hooked up with Sosthene de Rodiencourt, an aging Orientalist mystic. To finance a trip to Tibet, both have offered their services to a wealthy baronet, Colonel O'Collogham, who is testing military gas-masks in the hope of landing a lucrative contract. While Sosthene and O'Collogham test the masks, rattling the large house with bombs and chemicals, Ferdinand attempts to resist the lure of his host's angelic, underage, skimpily-dressed ward, Virginia, whom the Colonel humiliates by whipping in front of the servants. Terrorised by paranoia (that both the police and his old cronies are after him), a trip into the city for supplies sees Ferdinand confronted with unwelcome shades from the past.

The exhausting, febrile, exclamatory style of 'Bridge' takes its cue from its two protagonists, the mentally disoriented Ferdinand and the rythmically possessed Sostehme, with his epileptic Eastern dances. Comprising a handful of extended set-pieces, Celine doesn't so much describe the action so much as circle around it like a deranged vulture, skirting it with an excess of repetition, obscenity and slang. Ferdinand's 'reportage', coloured by paranoia, hallucination, spasms, fantasy, desire, dream, rage, confession, frustration, guilt, fear and shellshock is further disoriented by the skittish rhythms of his partner, whose possessed, frenzied dances imitate cod-Oriental texts. Many of the teeming set-pieces reveolve around literal dances - the acrobatic choreography of a ghost in a pulsing nightclub; the attempts by Sosthene to stop traffic in Picadilly with a ritualistic dance - and the style mimics their wild, jerking, swaying movements. The novel's coup-de-grace is an astonishing 100 page parody of Proust's 'Time Regained', using the same subject matter - Zeppelin air-raids, a phantasmagoric social occasion in which the hero meets figures from his past; the disorienting mix of aristocracy and criminality - but grinding it through a snarling demotic, brutal lowlife energy and slapstick violence, culminating in the arrival of a four months-long decomposing corpse.

This misanthropic catalogue of degraded and violent, if vibrant, human interaction finds room for some of the most vivid, hyperbolic and poetic descriptions of (a re-imagined) London in literature, with its labyrinthine back-streets, infernal hideouts and hangouts, and the teeming, larger-than-life activity of its ports, just as England's imperial glory is coming to an end.

The compulsive present-tense immediacy of the narrative is occasionally broken off by reminders of the narrator's vantage-point in the hell of World War 2, with the full knowledge of civilisation's embrace of the abyss. This twisted nostalgia, complete with incredulous winkings with the reader, mixed with Shakespeare, fairy tale and the Arabian Nights, illuminates the violence and grime with a genuine enchantment.

The full flavour of Celine's complex, neologistic verbal onslaught can never be caught in English, but translator Dominic di Bernardi comes closest yet, capturing rhythm, pace and the sheer overabundance or words, and is a vast improvement on the existing version of 'Guignol's Band' (any chance of having a go at that now, Mr. di Bernardi?)

On the Bridge...
The manuscript was found in the ruins of a post war Europe, "London Part 2" was the continuation of "Guignol's Band"...set in England amidst the lower denizens of the underworld during World War One, Celine invites us to walk down the dark paths once again...


Mea Culpa and the Life and Work of Semmelweis
Published in Hardcover by Howard Fertig (1979)
Author: Celine
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O culpado e a estátua
Este é o maior livro escrito por um nazista perturbado

More Distaste in Grand Speech
When Celine visited Russia in 1936 he was horrified by the "great utopia", in Mea Culpa, Celine unleashes his fury against mankind. It's a great chance to see Celine in his political best. His thesis is also included. There is a bit of literary quality about it also, like he was just inventing his style.


Rigodon
Published in Paperback by Schoenhof Foreign Books Inc (1987)
Author: Louis-Ferdinand D. Celine
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Flight...
Completed the day before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the mostcompassionate of Celine's novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath. The final entry in Celine's horrific trilogy (the preceding volumes are Castle to Castle and North) about his and his wife's flight from Vichy France through a collapsing Third Reich to Denmark, as they desperately seek to avoid punishment as Nazi collaborators. Often comic and always angry, the first-person autobiographical narrator, with his wife and their cat in tow, takes the reader with him on his flight from Paris to Denmark after finding himself on the losing side of World War II. The train rides that encompass the novel are filled with madness and mercy.... Celine quite deliberately makes us feel the inescapable, mind-rotting horror of endless chaos.... END

Lightings of style in the night of experience (2)

Celine once said he wrote to make other writers unreadable. While this may strike one as a strange project, I would agree, with many others, that it was largely fulfilled. Throughout his life, Celine evolved a very personal, "jubilatoire" (sorry, my first language is French) style that does make most of modern French authors look like zombies. "Rigodon", Celine's last book, displays a unique stylistic density. His famous ubiquitous "!..." actually hide ample stylistic movements of incredible precision. The English version should show how impossible it is to translate Celine's fantastic prose.

"Journey", Celine's first book, includes unexpected borrowings form colloquial, spoken French. A look to further works, however, shows that these borrowings were only a starting point for a unique work on the French language. From the night of his personal experience, Celine reaches through language to ultimate elegance, light and lightness - a transfiguration arguably difficult to translate into English.
-- Jacques P. Du Pasquier, Geneva, Switzerland
Editor of Hache, http://www.unige.ch/hache


Ballets without Music, without Dancers, without Anything
Published in Paperback by Green Integer (15 April, 1999)
Authors: Louis-Ferdinand, Louis-Ferdinand D. Celine, Eliane Bonabel, and Thomas Christensen
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Dancing With the Dead...
Celine was a great artist, not just a writer . . . in these imaginary ballets, he goes on to describe wonderful scenes. It's his style all dancing upon the page.


The Celine Dion Songbook
Published in Paperback by Warner Brothers Publications (22 May, 1995)
Authors: Carol Cuellar and Celine Dion
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Extremely wonderful song book
This song book includes such titles as: Beauty and the Beast * If You Asked Me To * Love Can Move Mountains * Misled * Only One Road * The Power of Love * Think Twice * Unison * Water from the Moon * When I Fall in Love * Where Does My Heart Beat Now. These are the songs that rose Celine to the top of the charts and now you'll know why if you purchase this enchanting book of love songs.


North
Published in Paperback by Dalkey Archive Pr (1996)
Authors: Ralph Manheim and Louis-Ferdinand D. Celine
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Witness devastation
In this partly autobiographical novel, we find Celine on the run through Baden Baden, a bombed out Berlin, and finally a small village at the outskirts of the remains of the Third Reich capital, on his way to what he hesitantly calls a refuge, during the chaos and total insanity of the final stages of the second world war.

Celine does not really complain the misery of his fate. In his cynical manner, he merely records his incredible encounters with seemingly all the renegades and twised characters of a scorched Europe and willing or not he witnesses the atrophies and deformities of human mind. Ironically, the author somehow manages to turn his characters into hillarious and amiable, even entertaining figures.

Celine writes like no other writer you have read. His truncated sentences, in bits and pieces all over the place, remind of a rather maniac mind spinning thoughts at the speed of light in an incohomprensive, bordering to delirious babble. That's Celine all right throughout North. In poignant remarks, making fun, laughing at himself, expressing same anxiety, bitternes, and cynical observations as in his other writings, Celine moves on, weary but undefeated. Life goes on.

From the Mountains...
North is the second book in the "trilogy" that begins with "Castle to Castle" and ends with "Rigadoon"...again, Celine tells us a fascinating story of all the people forming a train of endless death after World War 2...

Dynamite
The only novels I've ever read that are better are "Huckleberry Finn" and Celine's "Death on the Installment Plan." This book is far better than "Journey to the End of Night" and slightly more endearing than "Castle to Castle." A masterpiece of "social criticism," set against the dying days of Nazi Germany, but applicable to anywhere, any time. Read only the Manheim translation.


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