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The Last of Her Kind: A Novel Kindle Edition
Sigrid Nunez (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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The paths of two women from different walks of life intersect amid counterculture of the 1960s in this haunting and provocative novel from the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend
Named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and theChristian Science Monitor
Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind introduces two women who meet as freshmen on the Columbia campus in 1968. Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. She is mortified by Ann's romanticization of the underprivileged class, which Georgette herself is hoping college will enable her to escape. After the violent fight that ends their friendship, Georgette wants only to forget Ann and to turn her attention to the troubled runaway kid sister who has reappeared after years on the road. Then, in 1976, Ann is convicted of murder. At first, Ann's fate appears to be the inevitable outcome of her belief in the moral imperative to "make justice" in a world where "there are no innocent white people." But, searching for answers to the riddle of this friend of her youth, Georgette finds more complicated and mysterious forces at work.
The novel's narrator Georgette illuminates the terrifying life of this difficult, doomed woman, and in the process discovers how much their early encounter has determined her own path, and why, decades later, as she tells us, "I have never stopped thinking about her."
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication dateDecember 12, 2006
- File size623 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"[A] carefully written and discerning narrative with closely drawn portraits of two prototypical yet unique women trying to construct a friendship across an unbridgeable class divide. . .Nunez's keen powers of observation make her a natural chronicler."
Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com
"A writer of Nunez's piercing intelligence and post-feminist consciousness may well feel that writing the Great American Novel is no longer a feasible or worthwhile goal -- but damned if she hasn't gone and done it anyway."
About the Author
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.From The New Yorker
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
We had been living together for about a week when my roommate told me she had asked specifically to be paired with a girl from a world as different as possible from her own.
She did not want a roommate from the same privileged world in which she had been raised, she said. She did not want a roommate who had been raised, as she had been (but this was my thought, not hers), to believe you could make this kind of special request and expect it would be granted. I, for example, would never have believed that I could have had any say in my choice of roommates. I did remember receiving some forms from the college housing office that summer, and answering such questions as “Do you mind rooming with a smoker?” But that I could have filled the blank half page under Comments with something like “I want a roommate from this or that background” would never have occurred to me. No, I wrote. I did not mind rooming with a smoker, even though I was not a smoker myself. I had no preferences of any kind. I was completely flexible. Though I had done well in high school, I had never taken it for granted that I would go to college: no one in my family had done so before me. That I had managed to get into not just any college but a good one remained a little overwhelming. I left the space under Comments blank. I had no comment to write unless it was to say thank you, thank you for accepting me, and when my roommate told me what she had done, it brought me up sharp. How exactly had she phrased it? What words had she used to describe me?
* * *
It was 1968. “Your roommate will be Dooley Drayton,” someone from the school had written me later that summer. “Miss Drayton is from Connecticut.” But one of the many changes she made soon after arriving on campus was her name. She would no longer go by the name Dooley she said. It stank of bourgeois affectation. And worse. Dooley was a family name, and the part of her family that had borne the name, somewhere on her mother’s side, had been from the South, she said, and were descended from plantation owners. In other words, slaveholders. So “Dooley” was out of the question. We were never to call her by that shameful name but rather by her middle name, the taintless “Ann.”
Her father was the head of a firm that produced surgical instruments and equipment, a business that had been in Drayton hands for some generations (before that they were barbers, Ann told me, and this was true and not the joke I at first took it to be), and the family owned several valuable patents. Her mother did not work, she had never worked, though she’d had a good education. She, too, was from a prominent family, older and more distinguished if less prosperous than the Draytons, and she was an alumna of our school.
“She’s one of those women,” Ann said. “You know: she belongs to all these clubs and sits on all these boards, she goes to a lot of benefits and parties, and when she throws a party herself, it gets written up in the paper.”
I did not know any woman like that.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B004M8T0UW
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First edition (December 12, 2006)
- Publication date : December 12, 2006
- Language : English
- File size : 623 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 398 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #572,437 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,669 in Psychological Literary Fiction
- #4,707 in Psychological Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #5,627 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Sigrid Nunez was born in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father, whose lives she drew on for part of her first novel, A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD (1995). She went on to write six more novels, including THE LAST OF HER KIND (2006), SALVATION CITY (2010), THE FRIEND (2018), and WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH (September, 2020). She is also the author of SEMPRE SUSAN: A MEMOIR OF SUSAN SONTAG (2011). Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize, a Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Learn more at www.sigridnunez.com.
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In Defense od Simone Weil:
The author compares the character Ann to the late author and philosopher Simone Weil. I don’t disagree with this assertion. In Simone Weil’s “On the Abolition of All Political Parties”, Weil argues against to concept of political parties. She once said: “parties were organizations designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and justice”. Weil claimed we should not label ourselves as part of our thoughts “if one were to entrust the organization of public life to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device”. Ann has the fire and the spirit of Weil, but she is a role player of a team where all non-members are bad.
I found the martyrdom of the wealthy girl totally believable. I, too, had a college roommate who came from wealth but devoted her life to the part of society most people run from. As for the narrator's story, that, too, was beautifully drawn.
The scene in the affluent restaurant, while Judy Collins sings "Both Sides Now" in the background, is sublime!
/TundraVision, Amazon Reviewer "Been there, done that, got the proverbial T-shirt (which no longer fits this 40-years-older Boomer ;-) "
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