The Circus Fire by Stewart O'Nan is as riveting a narrative as is suggested by the blurbs and the other reviews. In some ways, the story is almost author proof as it comes with a easily recoginizable set of personalities and a moment that changes everyone lives. Fiction writers should have it so easy and that, in a way, is one of Stewart O'Nan's strengths. He turns his fiction writing skills towards writing a piece of history and creates this thrilling narrative. The bulk of the book is centred on that tragic day and we are led through the events with the help of some of the survivors and not a few of the victims. The book also shows the readers the aftereffects of such a tragedy on the lives of the survivors and the circus itself. This part of the story is presented in a manner that is as important and dramatic as the details of the actual fire. An exciting read.

Even though this event took place in our capital city of Hartford, Connecticut 15 years before I was born, I had heard and read about the fire throughout my life. No newspaper accounts, though, quite prepared me for the story presented here. Mr. O'Nan obviously did exhaustive research and interviews for this book. He actually makes the reader feel as though they are right inside the tent as the fire is raging. And the humanity felt afterward during the identification of the bodies and the investigation into how the fire started and who was responsible is very deeply felt. No detail is left out. At times, even, I felt I was told a little more than I needed to know. All in all, a fascinating read and a very well-written book.

This account of a ghastly event is extremely well researched and written. There is no hyperbole, no wringing of hands. The author simply lets the story tell itself through those who were there, for the most part.

Here is but a single stunning example, from p.109: "Several survivors said the one thing they will never forget about the circus fire as long as they live is the sound of the animals as they burned alive. But there were no animals." How much more effective that is, as prose, than the alternative method of saying the same thing.

Stories of individual selfishness and total selflessness abound, as they do in an accurate account of any great tragedy. The author does not omit either, so that the reader comes away with a feel for what it must have been like that hot July afternoon in Hartford, one month after D-Day.

I had misgivings about how well this could be told, before I read the book. Not now. I'd recommend this to any circus fan, to anyone who wants to read something really well written and thoroughly researched.

My only criticism is that the photos, many taken by amateurs, to be sure, are not well produced. I like the fact that they are on the pages where they fit, but in doing this on regular paper, details and drams are lost.

Stewart O'Nan never fails to impress me. He tackles different themes, different eras, different everything in each book. This one, slim and incisive, is a masterpiece of understatement. The tale of Jacob Hansen's life and losses soon after the Civil War, when the town of Friendship is stricken by both a diphtheria epidemic and a raging forest fire, is exquisitely simple but remarkably powerful. I haven't stopped thinking about this book since I finished reading it. I marvel at how much O'Nan manages to convey without ever being explicit. Love, tragic loss, and survival against all odds are the interwoven strands of the theme. Life lessons compressed into one short book. This is a very special novel, written by a wonderfully gifted writer.

I've just read for the third time this amazing book. It's as stunning a read the third time as the first. Told in the second person -- which, admittedly, can first be a bit disconcerting (with its hey-look-at-me-I-got-an-MFA-in-creative-writing pretensions) but that soon becomes an evocative part of the haunting prose -- the novel involves Jacob Hansen, sheriff, undertaker, and preacher to 1860s Friendship Wisconsin. Jacob's life is no pleasure cruise: he finds himself battling a terrible outbreak of diptheria that steals his town, his friends, his family; in addition, there's an out-of-control forest fire bearing town on his little town. Part horror story, part treatise on the nature of good and evil, on the choices we make, part poetry, the tale is unforgettable, one that will linger long after you've shut the book. There is a litany of horrific revealations toward end, each more shocking than the one before. You'll reel, you'll gasp, you'll read more. And that last line will ring loudest, reverberating in your mind for a long time to come.

In the end A Prayer for the Dying is all about decisions and how some choices are less choices than obligations. What O'Nan allows us to discover through Jake Hansen is that our goodness is sometimes contingent on circumstances (something most of us don't like to admit -- if we even bother to think about it in the first place).

Tremendous.

This is a truly gifted author. I became familiar with him when I read Snow Angels, and since then I have purchased nearly every book he has written. Each novel is an original piece. This novel, Prayer for the Dying is another stunning acomplishment. He takes the reader to post Civil War Wisconsin. His first person accounting is riveting as he takes you into the heart, mind and soul of Jacob Hansen, town sheriff, undertaker and pastor. Add to this odd mixture of occupations a devasting diptheria plague that threatens the town's human and animal population. A gentle, loving and spiritual family man, he must make horrendous decisions involving the township. While tradgedy befalls the town, he must cope with the possibility that he may have infected his beloved wife and baby daughter after undertaking the initial diptheria cases. Stewart O'Nan sets a thoroughly researched scene for the reader. You will walk through his surroundings and feel yourself in every step he takes, while you explore all his thoughts that challenge his faith and own mortality. An absolute masterpiece.

I'm very glad that so many readers liked this book, and that it's been a good one for Vietnam vets. But I felt that this book never found its way. It felt like snapshots from a depressive life, intermingled with a thriller. I guess it just didn't work for me as literature, or as a thriller. I was was drawn to O'Nan by his work in Granta 54, but I probably won't try him again.

Stewart O'Nan plunges the reader into the chambers of horrors that are the aftermath of Vietnam. He understands the razoredge tension of being underfire, the hopelessness of being without the security of even minimal coping that eats the brains of many Vietnam Vets, and he knows the vagaries of the promised paths of healing from physical and mental war wounds. Some writers describe actual moments of battle contact better than O'Nan but few dig into the battle rattle that so chronically impaled the men and boys who came home from Vietnam. And with all this ammunition on board, O'Nan has written a very fine novel that is, yes, grounded in the sequelae of war, but succeeds in unraveling a fascinating story of at least one man's survival. This is a pithy book and deserves to be placed on the shelf along with O'Brien, Caputo, Turner and the other fine writers who still struggle to make sense out of the irrational Vietnam error.

In the beginning I was pretty ambivalent with it, found the war scenes hard to read and stay with - but I kept with it and the more I read, the deeper I became drawn in. On all levels the book was real and deep. The writing was fabulous and beautiful. I think for the 1st time vietnam became very very real to me, the horror of it and the bonds the people who were there fighting made with one another and how incredibly hard it was for them to return to life here after there. The book moved me alot.

Stewart O'Nan, a young white man, sets for himself a most ambitious task in his 2001 novel Everyday People: a contemporary story set in the inner city, with mostly or entirely black characters, and dialogue in black dialect. As for setting, characters, and language, he succeeds. Where O'Nan came up a bit short was with plot. In large measure, O'Nan follows Chris ("Crest") Tolbert and his family during one week before the opening of a new expressway which will effectively cut the Tolbert's neighborhood from the rest of the city. Before the novel began, Crest was rendered a paraplegic when he fell of the half-completed parkway in an accident which also killed his best friend. How Crest, his family, his girlfriend (and now mother of his son), and others deal with this tragedy is a very promising beginning. O'Nan's failure, I believe, was in attempting to make his story too true to life, with several minor plot lines or stories that get started and remain unresolved - and unaddressed - by the book's final pages. Although this is how life often works, as a reader I found myself at the end asking "what about this?," and "what happened to him?" O'Nan overall seems a very gifted writer, and his characters are outstandingly drawn. Everyday People is certainly well worth reading for these reasons. However, in my judgment, it could have been better.

I can understand why this book may be compelling to those who are not: a)from Pittsburgh, b)looking for a intricately crafted story line, and most importantly c)African American. As the author notes near the end, maybe for a split second he can see what I see, but unfortunately, he fails to communicate the rich texture of the Black experience even in as wholly depressing environment as he attempts to create.

This book turned out to be a group of short stories centered on the daily stresses and encumbrances encountered by the Tolbert family and other community denizens in what he perceives to be life in Black urban America. I commend him on his ability to convey emotional structure but he fails to provide adequate imagery to give the reader a sense of the physical. I have a better mental picture of Tony's ice cream truck than any of the so-called African-American members of this community.

Within the Black community, descriptives that distinguish one person from another by complexion or physical features are commonplace. We only know the ethnicity of his characters by the authors' avowals and his inconsistent attempts to capture the vernacular which, by the way is not enhanced by any inclusions of "Pittsburghese." His patois of the street strikes me like someone without language skills attempting to emulate an upper crust British accent.

I was also disappointed in his failure to address the impact of ethnicity in relation Harold's homosexuality. Acceptance of that lifestyle has implications in the community - across the board and most particularly in the Black church- that Mr. O'Nan avoids entirely.

In essence, Mr. O'Nan writes of a sense of frustration, powerlessness and to an extent, resignation that is not predominant in East Liberty. It appears to be he who is incapable of seeing beyond the walls of the busway.

This is a competent effort, one that merits attention as a study of the human condition, however the emphasis on the African American community is a misguided one for this writer. I would suggest "Drop" by Matt Johnson or "White Boy Shuffle" by Paul Beatty, as two efforts more successfully conveying the subleties of the urban experience.

With his latest novel, ''Everyday People,'' Stewart O' Nan invents and enters the deprived African-American Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) neighborhood of East Liberty in the fall of 1998. At this time the neighborhood is about to be cut off from the rest of the city by the opening of a new expressway for buses. The town has always been victim to poverty and gang violence; during this one week, their patience will be tested more than usual.
At the center of the novel is the Tolbert family. Chris, also known as Crest, a seventeen-year-old boy who is the youngest in the Tolbert family, has just returned from the hospital in a wheelchair, coming out of a tragic accident that occurred on that very expressway which left him paralyzed from the waist down. That accident happened to take the life of his best friend, Bean. His older brother, Eugene, has just returned from jail and found Jesus as a born-again Christian. Harold, the boys' kind and loving father, is in love with a younger man (Andre) but leaves him, rationalizing that his boys need him more. Harold's wife, Jackie, senses that something is not right (though she believes his lover to be a younger woman), and is furious because the man she has always trusted has become the kind of man she had sworn she would never tolerate. Vanessa, the teenage mother of Crest's son, Rashaan, is trying to make more of her life by trying to balance her responsibility as a mother with the stress of waiting tables, and takes an adult education class in African-American literature at night school and realizes that she wants to learn more, which hopefully, will motivate her to obtain a college degree. Miss Fisk, is an elderly woman who looks after Rashaan, the way she used to look after Bean. Besides this one family, there are people dying, children involved with gangs, and many others being robbed all around.
Stewart O' Nan may be doubted because he is a white author who writes about an underprivileged African-American community and may not fully understand the experiences of those who actually live there. He captures the readers' attention with his vivid descriptions and interesting story plot. He incorporates the everyday lives that continue to go on in urban America. Many people are blind to see the reality of our world but this novel helps them listen to the voices of these characters, and let them know that they are everyday people, rather than gangsters, thieves, prostitutes or even drug addicts. Clearly the author wants the reader to realize how one crime can affect a whole community over a period of time. Honestly, I was a little disappointed because I'd rather of spent more time inside the head of Crest. He seemed like a good levelheaded boy who was influenced a lot by his surroundings. I would have loved to know all of his thoughts about what was going on in his community for that week, especially what he went through that will now change his life forever. It seemed like the underlying message of the story was to try and do good in life by staying on track and especially in school with an education because that is the key to a successful future, like Vanessa is trying to achieve.

While the characterization is often vibrant and exacting, this debut novel falls short of its promise. A main shortcoming is that the story of Arthur and his family, one of the two interwoven tales, fails to be more than filler, a structural place-holder. And Arthur's telling of the other story, that of a woman several years older than him, rings false--his need to relate these events is nowhere evident. Most disappointing is that many of O'Nan's sentences are ragged and difficult to read. One gets the sense he'll get a lot better.

I first bought this book four years ago and have read it 5 times since. Haunting images, desperate characters. Although this book is about murder and divorce, there are no villans and no heros. This book made Stewart O'Nan my favorite author. Also check out THE SPEED QUEEN

Dense! Needs to be read slowly: sentences are often put together in a way that brings the story to a halt and forces you to read them two or three times. My favorite is on p. 124: "Colored floodlights bathed the front of the complex aqua." Love it or hate it! Reading an O'Nan novel is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You know that horrible things are going to happen. When they do, they're not as bad as you thought they would be, and yet at the same time they're worse.

I absolutely loved O'Nan's "A Prayer for the Dying," so naturally I had to go back to his first book to see where he began. Although I managed to find a copy...

The twelve stories included in this collection are interesting. O'Nan shows a talent for giving us the same story through different perspectives, and his language is beautiful at times, but the collection seems to be a mixed bag. The two stories that I would consider rather weak are "Mr. Wu Thinks" and "The Third of July." It seems in these two stories mainly that O'Nan gives us something but doesn't really lead it into a pleasing direction. I kept wishing these two stories would go somewhere interesting. Both do manage to give us a lot of insight into their characters, but the ten other stories in the collection are superb and do a much better job of delving into the darkness of the human spirit.

I would actively search for this collection of stories. O'Nan almost had a perfect collection of stories on his hand, but even so, the vast majority of these stories are excellent and worth the purchase.

The first three quarters of this book are excellent, if a bit difficult to follow due to time changes and information that is left out for later. But overall I liked it. The last 1/4 is a bore. The same emotions repeated and the same family interactions with no one really growing or changing. Everyone resigned to the status quo. The mother is particularly unlikable. No way for me to know if the WWII stuff is accurate. I wasn't alive.

This is the kind of novel that may challenge a reader's investment. It is a book worthy of reading, but one that may take deeper reflection and patience for the story line and time period to assimilate. For some one that lived in this time, I imagine it could be an entirely different experience. O'Nan has obviously researched the era; the references to war events, the battles in Alaska, the names of songs and radio stations could bring back potent memories to the right persons. Even though it is not a time period I am intimately familiar to, I did feel caught up in much of the storyline.

The novel is subtle. Unlike many war stories, it concentrates on the family left at home. The war did not stop people from living their lives, making mistakes, having affairs and coping with the usual events any family must deal with. The investment the reader must make is to be patient enough to allow the characters to reveal themselves and for the gentle ambience so well presented by the author to enhance the story.

The story may not be as gripping as is the feel of the book, the emotional and crystal reminisces of the characters and the incredibly unique years of WWII.

The young men go away to war but family and life still goes on.
The story shifts from one era to another to give the reader an idea of how a veteran feels while at war and again when they are back at home, many years later.
This is a story of the effects and the memory of war and the lost innocense of young men. The sadness that stays with a war veteran during his daydreaming of fighting and fear.
A very worthwhile book to read.
A lot of different emotions and outcomes are entwined through this story of family, love, and war.

The San Francisco Chronicle praised Stewart O'Nan's The Speed Queen as "Classic American Noir". It is a really interesting and fast paced read, but the book is not really classic noir. It's more contemporary pulp with a moral - which takes away from the pure pulp element . It's kind of a teenagers version of Natural Born Killers.

The book opens with the protagonist on death row. A good place to begin a hot and heavy story. About to put to death for a vicious murder rampage through the American desert wastelands, Marjorie was once a speed freak involved in what became a deadly menage a trois. THAT is interesting stuff, and all the elements are there for a kicking ride through rebellion and counter culture insanity.

What brings the reader down from that high is the fact that Marjorie has found Jesus, and with the love of Jesus backing her, she maintains her innocense through interviews on trendy spots such as Oprah. The rights to her life story have been bought be Stephen King, who is interviewing her in prison before her lethal injection.

The story was powerful enough to hold its own without having Mr. King involved, which really makes no sense, as he is the king of horror, but not of real life debauch and devilry. Finding Jesus is lovely, but not in a thick plotted pulp or noir tale. Oprah is great, but Hard Copy would have taken the story first. The mainstream trendy references really distract from the meat of the story.

Real noir has no remorse, that is what makes is so fascinating to read or to watch. The author almost seemed fearful of letting go and living the thrust of the story.

This book would have been better had it just been the story of Marjorie, her husband Lamont and her lover Natalie riding high and nasty on meth amphetamine and a pipe dream gone up in smoke,

I loved the concept, but the final product was a bit weak.

It's totally worth having on the shelf, but as a skim read, not as a bible of bad girl.

Speed Queen is the exciting story of Marjorie, a death-row inmate from Oklahoma who is waiting to be executed. The woman reflects on her troubled drug-fueled life, and gives the reader a detailed description of her childhood, how she met her friends and came in contact with drugs before she ultimately reports about the crimes they have committed, and which are the reason why she has been sentenced.
Marjorie bluntly reveals the most intimate secrets of her love triangle, -between her, her girlfriend Natalie and her husband Lamont-, gives deep insight in what it is to be to be married to a car loving drug dealer, having a baby and living a life on speed.
The author's unique style of writing is a hallmark of this novel: song names, movies, books, drugs, local drive-thru restaurants and their menues - when reading this story the reader comes across numerous proper names, most of them only Stephen King fans, local citizens, junkies and car addicts have heard of. However, this does not affect the story negatively. The every-day language matches the story perfectly, yet it does not get too coloquial and after a few pages one quickly gets familiar with O'Nan's style and is introduced to the realistic world of Marjorie that is exciting, beautiful, strange and brutal at the same time.

This book is an unadulterated piece of CR--!! The author made no attempt to cross-check the material he put into it, and re-printed a large number of Vietnam War Myths, - the girl in the napalm strike, the 19 year old casualty, and many others, - as facts. If he is really teaching our youth the "history" of the Vietnam War using this tripe he should be called up before an academic review board and disciplined for sloppy research and distortion of the Nation's real effort in Southeast Asia.

Do yourself a favor and read a "real" book about the Vietnam War, one such as Geunter Lewy's "America in Vietnam", or Andrew Krepinevich's "The Army and Vietnam", if you are stuck with this one, read Burkett and Whitley's "Stolen Valor" in order to sort out the real from the fanciful.

I knew as soon as I got to page 2 of the intro that this would be a re-hash compilation of old B.S. war stories and half-baked myths masquerading as "Vietnam war history". And O'Nan is apparently still teaching this nonsense to unsuspecting college students! Take the oft-disproved LIES like "the average age of the combat soldier in Vietnam was 19". This doesn't square with the reality that the average age of those whose names are listed on The Wall and whose MOS is 11B (combat infantry) is 22.6 years of age. The average age of all Vietnam war fatalities was 23.1 years. Where does he come up with 19? Later we see those two famous (infamous) Vietnam photos with their DECEPTIVE captions. On page 439 "A South Vietnamese girl flees a U.S. napalm strike by Highway 1." Had O'Nan bothered to check his facts he'd discover that NO AMERICAN had any role whatsoever in this incident. South Vietnamese pilots flying South Vietnamese jets under the orders of South Vietnamese air controllers dropped the napalm on North Vietnamese Army positions in the village of Trang Bang when this picture was taken, June 8, 1972. Phan Thi Kim Phuc's injuries WERE NOT caused by any U.S. soldier. Later on page 691, we learn that "As Saigon falls, helicopters evacuate the U.S. embassy." More crap. The rooftop evacuation in the photo is from THE PITTMAN APARTMENTS in Saigon. Many of the works and authors cited in The Vietnam Reader were also critiqued in the book STOLEN VALOR. In Stolen Valor you will learn that many of the "Vets" writing these exciting stories of combat derring-do WEREN'T EVEN IN VIETNAM (if they were indeed in the service at all!) Do yourself a favor. If you want an honest, authoritative, objective, and well-documented expose' of thirty years of Vietnam war mis-information, read Stolen Valor instead.

... O'Nan has put together some of the best literature written by Americans about the Vietnam War since the late '60s. A quick look at the table of contents should put anyone's doubts to rest--especially since O'Nan has included a generous amount of space to Tim O'Brien, certainly the finest American writer about the Vietnam War. I had two problems with this book, besides the fact that this should be available in hardback. 1) O'Nan has failed to include anything from Thom Jones's book "The Pugilist at Rest"--an excellent writer, close on O'Brien's tail in terms of sheer storytelling. 2) This book includes nothing by Vietnamese writers--which I find a huge oversight...
This book does not pretend to be history...

First of all, if you are a John Gardner fan boost this rating to a five. There are many John C Gardner's to enjoy: the poet, novelist, teacher, critic, playwriter. To me this man was at his best as a teacher and novelist and for this reason I rate 'On Writers and Writing' highly. His insights on the works of contemporary and some not so contemprary writer's offer, most particulary to Gardner fans, a better view of the mans opinions, values and philosophies, ones that come through a bit more cryptically ( most often for artisic purposes) in his often underrated fiction. For Gardner fans this is a must own. For others, an enjoyable read.