Baixe o app Kindle gratuito e comece a ler livros do Kindle instantaneamente em seu smartphone, tablet ou computador - sem a necessidade de um dispositivo Kindle.
Leia instantaneamente em seu navegador com o Kindle para internet.
Usando a câmera do seu celular, digitalize o código abaixo e baixe o app Kindle.
Imagem não disponível
Cor:
-
-
-
- Para ver este vídeo faça o download Flash Player
Amostra Amostra
Seguir o autor
OK
Ragtime: A Novel Capa comum – 8 maio 2007
Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War.
The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
Sobre o Autor
Trecho. © Reimpressão autorizada. Todos os direitos reservados
Mother's Younger Brother was in love with Evelyn Nesbit. He had closely followed the scandal surrounding her name and had begun to reason that the death of her lover Stanford White and the imprisonment of her husband Harry K. Thaw left her in need of the attentions of a genteel middle-class young man with no money. He thought about her all the time. He was desperate to have her. In his room pinned on the wall was a newspaper drawing by Charles Dana Gibson entitled 'The Eternal Question.' It showed Evelyn in profile, with a profusion of hair, one thick strand undone and fallen in the configuration of a question mark. Her downcast eye was embellished with a fallen ringlet that threw her brow in shadow. Her nose was delicately upturned. Her mouth was slightly pouted. Her long neck curved like a bird taking wing. Evelyn Nesbit had caused the death of one man and wrecked the life of another and from that he deduced that there was nothing in life worth having, worth wanting, but the embrace of her thin arms.
The afternoon was a blue haze. Tidewater seeped into his footprints. He bent down and found a perfect shell specimen, a variety not common to western Long Island Sound. It was a voluted pink and amber shell the shape of a thimble, and what he did in the hazy sun with the salt drying on his ankles was to throw his head back and drink the minute amount of sea water in the shell. Gulls wheeled overhead, crying like oboes, and behind him at the land end of the marsh, out of sight behind the tall grasses, the distant bell of the North Avenue streetcar tolled its warning.
Across town the little boy in the sailor suit was suddenly restless and began to measure the length of the porch. He trod with his toe upon the runner of the cane-backed rocking chair. He had reached that age of knowledge and wisdom in a child when it is not expected by the adults around him and consequently goes unrecognized. He read the newspaper daily and was currently following the dispute between the professional baseballers and a scientist who claimed that the curve ball was an optical illusion. He felt that the circumstances of his family's life operated against his need to see things and to go places. For instance he had conceived an enormous interest in the works and career of Harry Houdini, the escape artist. But he had not been taken to a performance. Houdini was a headliner in the top vaudeville circuits. His audiences were poor people--carriers, peddlers, policemen, children. His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color and couldn't stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.
The little boy stood at the end of the porch and fixed his gaze on a bluebottle fly traversing the screen in a way that made it appear to be coming up the hill from North Avenue. The fly flew off. An automobile was coming up the hill from North Avenue. As it drew closer he saw it was a black 45-horsepower Pope-Toledo Runabout. He ran along the porch and stood at the top of the steps. The car came past his house, made a loud noise and swerved into the telephone pole. The little boy ran inside and called upstairs to his mother and father. Grandfather woke with a start. The boy ran back to the porch. The driver and the passenger were standing in the street looking at the car: it had big wheels with pneumatic tires and wooden spokes painted in black enamel. It had brass headlamps in front of the radiator and brass sidelamps over the fenders. It had tufted upholstery and double side entrances. It did not appear to be damaged. The driver was in livery. He folded back the hood and a geyser of white steam shot up with a hiss.
- Número de páginas320 páginas
- IdiomaInglês
- EditoraRandom House Trade
- Data da publicação8 maio 2007
- Idade de leitura14 - 18 anos
- Dimensões13.16 x 1.75 x 20.07 cm
- ISBN-100812978188
- ISBN-13978-0812978186
- Medida Lexile930L
Clientes que compraram este item também compraram
Detalhes do produto
- Editora : Random House Trade; Reprint edição (8 maio 2007)
- Idioma : Inglês
- Capa comum : 320 páginas
- ISBN-10 : 0812978188
- ISBN-13 : 978-0812978186
- Idade de leitura : 14 - 18 anos
- Dimensões : 13.16 x 1.75 x 20.07 cm
- Ranking dos mais vendidos: Nº 386,307 em Livros (Conheça o Top 100 na categoria Livros)
- Nº 492 em Graphic Novels de Ficção Histórica Importadas
- Nº 5,274 em Importados de Ficção Clássica
- Avaliações dos clientes:
Sobre o autor
Descubra mais livros do autor, veja autores semelhantes, leia blogs de autores e muito mais
Avaliações de clientes
As avaliações de clientes, incluindo as avaliações do produto por estrelas, ajudam os clientes a saberem mais sobre o produto e a decidirem se é o produto certo para eles.
Para calcular a classificação geral por estrelas e o detalhamento percentual por estrelas, não usamos uma média simples. Em vez disso, nosso sistema considera coisas como o quão recente é uma avaliação e se o avaliador comprou o produto na Amazon. As avaliações também são analisadas para verificar a confiabilidade.
Saiba mais sobre como as avaliações de clientes funcionam na Amazon-
Melhores avaliações
Principais avaliações do Brasil
Ocorreu um problema para filtrar as avaliações agora. Tente novamente mais tarde.
Eu já tinha cancelado minha assinatura da Tag (clube de livros) quando vi, sem querer, uma foto do livro do mês. Era Ragtime em uma edição belíssima, com um piano que se transforma no skyline novaiorquino. Além disso, o livro é um dos 1001 para ler antes de morrer, portanto, corri para renovar minha assinatura a tempo.
Ragtime é um gênero musical que nasceu no final do século XIX nas comunidades negras dos Estados Unidos, sendo precursor do jazz. O livro de Doctorow se passa no início do século XX, quando o ritmo, que tinha o piano como seu principal instrumento, estava no seu auge.
Depois da capa glamourosa, da explicação sobre o ragtime, da playlist maravilhosa e do mimo em formato de piano que a Tag enviou, criei grandes expectativas e imaginei que teríamos o ragtime, seus músicos e algum clube como cenário. Pra não dizer que não tem nada disso, um dos personagens principais menciona que é músico e toca uma única vez o piano. Só. [Sim, há referências na capa que podem ser apontadas, como uma chuva de fogos ou o piano, mas simplesmente não funcionou para mim.]
Tirando a falta de conexão entre capa e história, o livro é excelente, embora não tenha um pingo de glamour. É uma história triste, de preconceitos, de sobrevivência, de rótulos, de segregação. São muitos personagens, entre fictícios e reais, que aparecem e desaparecem, se conectam e se perdem.
A escrita de Doctorow é fabulosa e nos leva a ler páginas e mais páginas sem sentir. Se o ragtime tem algo a ver com essa história, certamente é com o estilo de narrativa meio descompassada, meio solta, meio bagunçada, mas que no final tem harmonia, tal qual o gênero musical. Pode parecer loucura, mas depois de ouvir as músicas foi inevitável a associação do ritmo delas à escrita do autor.
Além da escrita, um ponto alto são os personagens históricos que enriquecem o livro, como Evelyn Nesbit, Henry Ford e J.P. Morgan. Destaco também os personagens sem nome, que pregam uma peça no leitor lá nas primeiras páginas, fazendo com que pensem estar lendo um história em 1ª pessoa.
Ragtime me fez entender de forma bem clara um pouco do que foi o início do século XX nos Estados Unidos e todas as dificuldades e preconceitos sofridos pelos imigrantes. Um bom livro, sem dúvidas, e só a escrita já vale a leitura.
Principais avaliações de outros países
Set mostly in New York from the turn of the century to the US’s belated entry to the First World War, a cavalcade of characters parade across the pages, many fictional, many real, their lives separate but crossing and impacting each on the others. Through them we get a kaleidoscopic vision of a fractured American society, full of extremes – wealth, poverty, get rich quick and get poor quicker, slums and mansions, warmongers and peacemakers, capitalism, socialism, anarchism and patriotism, psychoanalysis, spiritualism, race and civil rights. JP Morgan, Harry Houdini, Booker T Washington, Stanford White, Sigmund Freud – a roll call of the famous whose names have lived on, mixed with those who were headliners in their day but whose fame has faded, and some fictional characters so well drawn and smoothly fitted in that I frequently couldn’t work out who was real and who fictional.
At the centre is a family, named only by their family position – Mother, Father, Little Boy and Mother’s Younger Brother. These characters are used to provide tenuous links to all the others and, in some sense perhaps, to show the impact of the movers and shakers on “ordinary” people. Father leaves his business of manufacturing fireworks and patriotic flags in the hands of Mother’s Younger Brother while he goes off to join Robert Peary’s expedition to the North Pole. Mother’s Younger Brother becomes involved first with Evelyn Nesbit (wife of Harry K Thaw who murdered Stanford White) and then with anarchist Emma Goldman. A second family we meet, linked via Evelyn Nesbit, are a Jewish father and daughter, again unnamed. Through Tateh, the father, we are taken to the world of industrial strife in Pennsylvania and later into the new world of the movies.
This all led me to believe that all fictional characters were unnamed, so that when Coalhouse Walker, Jr., appeared I was convinced, wrongly, that he must have been real. A black musician, his pride and joy is his brand-new Ford, but then as now, a black man in a big car is a target for racists. Gradually Coalhouse’s story takes centre stage, as he reaches a point where he can no longer tolerate the unfairness of a society that pretends that black people are citizens with rights while treating them as less than human and expecting them to quietly submit. In his story is all the howl of rage that still reverberates a hundred years on from the setting and fifty years after this book was published: from Booker T Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr., to George Floyd and BLM – from bending the knee, to the knee on the neck, to taking a knee. All the humour, all the playfulness, all the quick changes of tone and rhythm that Doctorow uses to make his book an entertaining syncopated rag, can’t dissipate or disguise the angry power of Coalhouse’s story.
It took me a while to get into the book. The first section mostly concerns the unnamed family and Mother’s Younger Brother’s obsession with Evelyn Nesbit, and is full of the American male mid-20th century authors’ obsession with sex. Here we go again, I thought. Lots of famous names touched on and so many themes thrown out there, shallowly and without substance – socialism and capitalism, unions, the place of women, Freud and Jung, Houdini and spectacle – those jigsaw pieces fall thick and fast. But gradually it becomes clear the depth comes not from the individual incidents or characters but from the whole picture as it begins to form. Are the stories he tells about the real characters true? Did Houdini really start debunking spiritualists because of his excessive love for his dead mother? Did JP Morgan really believe that an elite, of whom he is, of course, one, is reincarnated in each generation to rule the world? Did Harry K Thaw really escape from prison by using a technique he learned from Houdini? Did Freud and Jung really ride the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island together? I felt I could spend the rest of my life googling, and then I realised it didn’t matter – I didn’t care about the literal truth of these things because they felt real in the context of the book and worked as metaphors for this frenzied, erratic, rapidly evolving society.
"Despite such experiences Houdini never developed what we think of as a political consciousness. He could not reason from his own hurt feelings. To the end he would be almost totally unaware of the design of his career, the great map of revolution laid out by his life. He was a Jew. His real name was Erich Weiss. He was passionately in love with his ancient mother whom he had installed in his brownstone home on West 113th Street. In fact Sigmund Freud had just arrived in America to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and so Houdini was destined to be, with Al Jolson, the last of the great shameless mother lovers, a nineteenth-century movement that included such men as Poe, John Brown, Lincoln, and James McNeill Whistler. Of course Freud's immediate reception in America was not auspicious. A few professional alienists understood his importance, but to most of the public he appeared as some kind of German sexologist, an exponent of free love who used big words to talk about dirty things. At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America for ever."
I originally planned to read this as part of my long-ago quest to find The Great American Novel. I don’t know that I’d quite class it as that but I’d certainly call it A Great American Novel, which both entertains and gives a lot of insight into the US psyche and its never-ending pursuit of that nebulous thing we call the American Dream.