Picture 1 of 6
Gallery
Picture 1 of 6
Have one to sell?
The SCIENTISTS A Family Romance Memoir by Marco Roth 1st Edition HCDJ
US $10.99
ApproximatelyRM 46.69
Condition:
“The SCIENTISTS A Family Romance Memoir by Marco Roth Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2012 1st Printing ISBN: ”... Read moreabout condition
Very Good
A book that has been read but is in excellent condition. No obvious damage to the cover, with the dust jacket included for hard covers. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, and no underlining/highlighting of text or writing in the margins. May be very minimal identifying marks on the inside cover. Very minimal wear and tear.
Oops! Looks like we're having trouble connecting to our server.
Refresh your browser window to try again.
Pickup:
Free local pickup from Arena, Wisconsin, United States.
Shipping:
US $5.95 (approx RM 25.28) USPS Media MailTM.
Located in: Arena, Wisconsin, United States
Delivery:
Estimated between Thu, 31 Jul and Thu, 7 Aug to 94104
Returns:
30 days return. Buyer pays for return shipping. If you use an eBay shipping label, it will be deducted from your refund amount.
Coverage:
Read item description or contact seller for details. See all detailsSee all details on coverage
(Not eligible for eBay purchase protection programmes)
Seller assumes all responsibility for this listing.
eBay item number:195530982214
Item specifics
- Condition
- Very Good
- Seller Notes
- ISBN
- 9780374210281
About this product
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
ISBN-10
0374210284
ISBN-13
9780374210281
eBay Product ID (ePID)
113295795
Product Key Features
Book Title
Scientists : a Family Romance
Number of Pages
208 Pages
Language
English
Publication Year
2012
Topic
Parenting / Fatherhood, Death, Grief, Bereavement, Personal Memoirs, Diseases / Aids & Hiv
Genre
Family & Relationships, Health & Fitness, Biography & Autobiography
Format
Hardcover
Dimensions
Item Height
0.8 in
Item Weight
11.6 Oz
Item Length
8.6 in
Item Width
5.9 in
Additional Product Features
Intended Audience
Trade
LCCN
2011-051264
Reviews
The Scientists is . . . not simply a perceptive and highly literary memoir but a book about attempting to uncover the mystery of a father's life after his death, and the posthumous intimacy that forms., Marco Roth emerged from his privileged New York City childhood like one of Salinger's precocious Glass children, but Roth's family was ravaged by secrets, and from this history he has written a gorgeous memoir no one will be able to put down: psychologically adroit, precise, moving--one of the best memoirs I've read in years., [An] affecting memoir . . . The book is, among other things, a cautionary tale of a hypertrophied intellectualism that overreacts to any faint threat of sentimentality or child's logic, and threatens to choke off and kill any spontaneous show of pleasure, passion or affection . . . The Scientists is an act of love--a circumspect, often bitter, always studious love--and thus an act of both filial piety and defiance., A book that has stayed with me this year is Marco Roth's quiet, reflective, and deeply candid memoir The Scientists: A Family Romance . It is the story of a childhood spent keeping a terrible secret--the fact that Roth's father, a scientist, was dying of AIDS--and the ways that secret shaped Roth's passage into adulthood. Roth also has valuable things to say about what draws people to literature and literary theory, and how the attempt to understand life through books can both enlighten and mislead., The Scientists manages to recuperate for our time a certain kind of personal, idiosyncratic, private writing that moves at the speed of an actual very high intelligence. No one in our generation has written anything like this., Roth's prose evokes a calm, contemplative feel, with occasional flights of poetic fancy . . . The Scientists is at its strongest as Roth tries to unravel the mystery of his father. That relationship, fraught as it is, brings forth Roth's humanist side, as he tries not only to understand his father, but also to redeem him . . . The Scientists evinces a compelling portrait of the intellectual as a young man., Marco Roth's affecting memoir The Scientists . . . evokes that world of intellectuals, Oriental rugs and a postwar highbrow aesthetic of Schubert, Turgenev and Mann. This is less of a confessional memoir than a fiercely intellectual one, but that's not to say it's not emotionally powerful . . . This unsentimental memoir is a cautionary tale about hyper-intellectualism in which emotional life is at the back of the bus., With the precociousness expected of the only child of a doctor and a classical musician-from the time he could get his toddler tongue to a pronounce a word like "De-oxy ribonucleic acid," or recite a French poem-Marco Roth was able to share his parents' New York, a world centered around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and dinner discussions of the latest advances in medicine. That world ended when his father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that infected him in the early 1980s. What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, often in unexpected ways. The Scientists is a story of how we first learn from our parents and how we then learn to see them as separate individuals; it's a story of how precociousness can slow us down when it comes to knowing about our desires and other people's. A memoir of parents and children in the tradition of Edmund Gosse, Henry Adams, and J.R. Ackerley, The Scientists grapples with a troubled intellectual and emotional inheritance, in a style that is both elegiac and defiant., Marco Roth's memoir is a farewell to a bygone Jewish American culture--polyglot, intellectual, Europhile, psychoanalytic--and simultaneously a renewal of that culture. It's both moving and tough-minded, a book of high intellect and deep feeling the like of which nobody else could write., To the extent that lucid, self-lacerating prose can break a cycle of frustrations, The Scientists is a literary triumph., [Roth is] self-aware, perceptive and soulful . . . [ The Scientists ] feels wisely grounded. It's an elegy not just for a lost parent but for what Roth's bio calls 'the vanished liberal culture of Manhattan's Upper West Side.', This is the first intellectual autobiography by someone our age in the searching nineteenth-century tradition of Edmund Gosse or Henry Adams: the autobiography equally of a reader and of a son, grappling with an inheritance that is both intellectual and emotional--an education for our times., This slim, fierce meditation takes readers into realms where more emotional, confessional tales rarely tread. Roth is an intellectual. (How could he be otherwise with that upbringing?) The Scientists not only precisely evokes the lost postwar world of high European culture that once thrived on New York's Upper West Side, but also traces Roth's subsequent struggles to understand how his upbringing--with its intense emphasis on the life of the mind--both liberated and, as he puts it, "thwarted" him . . . Ultimately, Roth's quest brings him back to a posthumous confrontation with the father who first deceived him, to ask the question of whether it's ever possible to escape a family legacy of unhappiness, "reticence" and "pretense." This memoir itself, a prolonged and unsentimental backward glance, serves as its own disturbing answer to that question., The Scientists is highly intelligent, but to call a debut so concerned with uncertainty "assured" would misrepresent its complexity. The episodic structure creates a sense of dislocation so that the ending, when Roth makes discoveries and recovers those aspects of himself he needs to live and write free from the shame that consumed his father, provides hard-earned catharsis., Nothing seems embellished in The Scientists . Roth wasn't looking to tell a coming-of-age story or write a book that feeds into his idea that the modern reader views literature as 'spectacle'--as he wrote in a 2006 issue of n+1 . Roth's concern with The Scientists is to tell his story, the story of a dark period in his life and the way he coped with it. He isn't trying to feed juicy pieces of gossip to sell the book, rather he takes the brave step of telling his story the only way he seems able to, and it has paid off in dividends by the time you finally close it., The Scientists is . . . a book worth reading . . . The memoir is at once about the process of maturation, and an example of how to write . . . intelligent and emotionally moving. More importantly, The Scientists is a brave and honest examination of shifting cultural values, liberal hypocrisy, and privileged guilt. Above all else, it is an exploration of the best way to live one's life--which is, after all, the very point of literature., With the precociousness expected of the only child of a doctor and a classical musician -- from the time he could get his toddler tongue to a pronounce a word like "De-oxy ribonucleic acid," or recite a French poem -- Marco Roth was able to share his parents' New York, a world centered around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and dinner discussions of the latest advances in medicine. That world ended when his father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that infected him in the early 1980s. What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, often in unexpected ways. The Scientists is a story of how we first learn from our parents and how we then learn to see them as separate individuals; it's a story of how precociousness can slow us down when it comes to knowing about our desires and other people's. A memoir of parents and children in the tradition of Edmund Gosse, Henry Adams, and J.R. Ackerley, The Scientists grapples with a troubled intellectual and emotional inheritance, in a style that is both elegiac and defiant., A lyrical depiction of education, family relationships, self-knowledge, and 'a culture that believes no one should suffer, least of all in public.', The author's prose [is] effortlessly erudite and often startlingly precise. He writes beautifully. That care, which breathes through every paragraph, is freighted too with a kind of desperation. This is a book that Roth feels born, or doomed, to write . . . Roth quickly and likably departs from any such rational scheme in favour of the more chaotic and obsessive, hopelessly self-absorbed stuff of his life. You guess that few authors have been more relieved to get to the final page of a book than this one; for my part, as a reader, I was just sad it had ended., Roth brings a wistful dryness to his work; he is relaxed in the peculiar details of a story that limns much of what is universal between fathers and sons . . . Here a strange, perfectionist family becomes worth pondering. The Scientists produced a son worth knowing., Circuitous, elegant and fiercely intelligent, this memoir is Mr. Roth's attempt to understand his father's character in order to better know his own . . . With the wisdom of a good reader and the humility of a lost soul, Mr. Roth sorts through the mess of his past--in order to plot his escape from it., What makes The Scientists singularly brave is not the nature of its disclosures but the fact that Roth, a great writer, risked appearing mercenary or opportunistic in order to write it. He staked his relatively young reputation on the belief that he could convey absolute honesty and resist the impulse to curry sympathy or self-mythologize. At times Roth comes off poorly--overly sensitive, or too eager to think where he might feel--but it is a measure of his honesty that he never seems oblivious to his faults. In revisiting experiences more painful than many of his readers will ever have to endure, he is incapable of weakness or insincerity . . . One marvels at Roth's inner life, which he has rendered so richly. If one begins this book asking, 'Just who does he think he is?' that reader will certainly finish it thinking, 'Glad I asked.', Profound, intricate, literary, a little gossipy and more than a little heartbreaking--such is Marco Roth's echt New York memoir, The Scientists . . . Far from confessional, Roth's exploration is tough-minded, beautifully written, sometimes wry and self-mocking and always faithful to the complexities of his own feeling an thinking, his own failures and frailties., [ The Scientists ] is an exquisitely written and intensely interior book, one that eschews the contemporary memoir's penchant for epiphanies, redemption and tidy resolutions . . . Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this memoir is how free it is of self-importance . . . Although sincerity and authenticity were surely virtues regarded with skepticism in the graduate schools where Roth whiled away his 20s, they are also qualities The Scientists possesses in spades. It refuses even to lord Roth's present-day understanding over his clueless past self -- that is, to indulge in the egotism of autobiographical irony. 'I was lost then, and I'm probably still lost,' he seems to be saying, 'but this is the story of how I fumbled, and am fumbling, a bit closer to the truth.' . . . The Scientists closes with a scene of him still at sea, starting all over again, beginning to write what you suddenly realize is the book you're holding in your hands. He hasn't quite arrived, but it's good know that at last he can see the shore., [A] beautifully sharp memoir . . . Marco Roth turns his analytical eye on the culturally rich milieu of his upbringing and the mode of education he received within the walls of his home . . . The Scientists is composed with the same analytical eye for influence that the critic has brought to the table as an editor and writer for n+1 . A less diligent memoirist might have easily restricted this meditation on retrospective reading to more defensive, sentimental territory, and Roth's acknowledgment of the uncertainty of his purpose is commendable both for its bravery and its awareness . . . The Scientists is still, at its most fundamental, a family romance : elegiac, rife with frustrations of desire and secrecy . . . Roth's prose, which has been well tuned by years of academic writing and meticulous study of literary classics, is luminous and graceful. His gift for building plot from domestic drama is similarly patent; his story is gripping, and The Scientists: A Family Romance is a burning work, alive with all the romantic potentials one would expect of a canonical classic--or, better yet, of a family life lived deeply, richly, and painfully., This book is suffused with real pain . . . The best things in The Scientists are Mr. Roth's spiny meditations on sex and ambition and family and love and death. The sound this book makes is the sound of a keen mind on shuffle. He strongly evokes a generational sense of malaise . . . [ The Scientists ] lingers in the cranium.
TitleLeading
The
Dewey Edition
23
Number of Volumes
1 vol.
Dewey Decimal
362.19697920092
Synopsis
A frank, intelligent, and deeply moving debut memoirWith the precociousness expected of the only child of a doctor and a classical musician from the time he could get his toddler tongue to a pronounce a word like "De-oxy ribonucleic acid," or recite a French poem Marco Roth was able to share his parents' New York, a world centered around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and dinner discussions of the latest advances in medicine. That world ended when his father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that had infected him in the early 1980s.What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, often in unexpected ways. "The Scientists" is a story of how we first learn from our parents and how we then learn to see them as separate individuals; it's a story of how precociousness can slow us down when it comes to knowing about our desires and other people's. A memoir of parents and children in the tradition of Edmund Gosse, Henry Adams, and J.R. Ackerley, "The Scientists "grapples with a troubled intellectual and emotional inheritance, in a style that is both elegiac and defiant.", A frank, intelligent, and deeply moving debut memoir With the precociousness expected of the only child of a doctor and a classical musician--from the time he could get his toddler tongue to a pronounce a word like "De-oxy ribonucleic acid," or recite a French poem--Marco Roth was able to share his parents' New York, a world centered around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and dinner discussions of the latest advances in medicine. That world ended when his father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that had infected him in the early 1980s. What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, often in unexpected ways. The Scientists is a story of how we first learn from our parents and how we then learn to see them as separate individuals; it's a story of how precociousness can slow us down when it comes to knowing about our desires and other people's. A memoir of parents and children in the tradition of Edmund Gosse, Henry Adams, and J.R. Ackerley, The Scientists grapples with a troubled intellectual and emotional inheritance, in a style that is both elegiac and defiant.
LC Classification Number
RA643.84.N7R68 2012
Item description from the seller
Popular categories from this store
Seller feedback (22,267)
- k***k (301)- Feedback left by buyer.Past monthVerified purchaseItem was packaged nicely and arrived in a timely manner! They are just as expected, thank you so much! A+++
- 0***a (53)- Feedback left by buyer.Past monthVerified purchaseBeautiful Print, fast and safe shipping!
- m***r (7651)- Feedback left by buyer.Past monthVerified purchasePleased
More to explore :
- 1st Edition Romance Antiquarian & Collectible Books,
- 1st Edition Family Circle Magazines,
- Parenting & Family 1st Edition Magazines,
- 1st Edition Veronica Roth Antiquarian & Collectible Books,
- 1st Edition Romance Original Antiquarian & Collectible Books,
- 1st Edition Magazines,
- Easyriders 1st Edition Magazines,
- Maxim 1st Edition Magazines,
- 1st Edition Textbooks,
- 1st Edition Time Magazines