The Condition
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Book Overview
In the summer of 1976, during their annual retreat on Cape Cod, the McKotch family came apart. Now, twenty years after daughter Gwen was diagnosed with Turner's syndrome--a rare genetic condition that keeps her trapped forever in the body of a child--eminent scientist Frank McKotch is divorced from his pedigreed wife, Paulette. Eldest son Billy, a successful cardiologist, lives a life built on secrets and compromise. His brother Scott awakened from a pot-addled adolescence to a soul-killing job and a regrettable marriage. And Gwen--bright and accomplished but hermetic and emotionally aloof--spurns all social interaction until, well into her thirties, she falls in love for the first time. With compassion and almost painful astuteness, The Condition explores the power of family mythologies--the self-delusions, denials, and inescapable truths that forever bind fathers and mothers and siblings.
Customer Reviews
Rated 5 starsSomething for those who want to know more.
Michael Parenti's America Besieged is a wonderful book. It is a political science type book that tells what's really going on in America. Parenti focuses on America and what is really going on behind closed doors. He reminds us of how democracy really works in the USA. This book is organized in five parts. It doesn't go easy to hard stuff, but from how politics work to how things are really run. Parenti dives into how...
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Rated 5 starsMagnificent
Great book!Michael Parenti did it, a great well-organized book which step-by-step examines everything revolving around our life, from the media to the economy, to the politics, and relates it to how all these three strangleholds on society are manipulated and/or owned by capital and corporations. Parenti also confronts capitalism as an "system without a soul or humanity" which reduces every human activity to market profitablity...
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Rated 5 starsGoes to the core
A reader can learn more about how the system works from this one book than from a standard four-year course in political science at a respectable university. I know I did. Not that my eyes were opened by Parenti's insights, good as they are. Most have been around for some time. What the author has done instead is present them in highly readable and accessible style that both illuminates and persuades. There is more floodlight...
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Rated 5 starsA Valuable Book That Confirms...
what many already know or suspect about corporate capitalist control of our economy and therefore, to a great extent, our lives. I think it was George Orwell who once said: "The greatest threat to Democracy is the notion that we have already achieved it." This book (as well as Parenti's others) should blow away once and for all that false idea that we live under a system of government "of, by, and for the people". That...
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Rated 5 starsExcellent Analysis!
Every American who is not independently wealthy should read this book. Michael Parenti makes sense out of why the "American Dream" is evaporating for so many of us; what GATT and NAFTA really mean to the average American; in what ways, and why, politicians are so out of touch with the American people; and what we can do about the growing income disparity.
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Normal People Mentions in Our Blog
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To celebrate St. Patrick's Day, we wanted to applaud some of the most exciting Irish novelists of the moment. With forefathers like James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett, these up-and-coming bards have some big shoes to fill, and they're doing brilliantly!
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