Rating: 
Summary: I read it for school, and I am NOT feeling it at ALL.
Review: I had to pick a book off of the "Top 100 Books" list for my sophmore honors English class. I chose William Kennedy's award winning, "Ironweed". I would NOT recomend this book to anyone who is bored easily. It was a slow, boring read. At the end it had no effect on me and I learned nothing from this book. In my opinon "great literature" is a novel or novella or anything that is written where a reader takes something away with him/her, I did NOT take anything away with me from this junky book.
Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding Language; Brilliant Style; Hard to Forget
Review: When I bought Ironweed, it was for the mere purpose of contemplating just what it was about the novel that won it the Pulitzer prize. I picked it up late on a Saturday night I read it from cover to cover once I returned home. The language in the novel brilliant and the style is very unique. The characters are also ones that will not perish from the mind like many others that have been created in past [cherished] novels; and make sure you do not touch the movie! Read the book and never watch the movie! Thanks HT
Rating:
Summary: grossly over-rated
Review: A mediocre diversion, sententious and banal, grossly--or rather, grotesquely--over-rated.
Rating:
Summary: haunting, lovely
Review: oh, lost people, our humanity...
Rating:
Summary: An American classic; finest in its generation.
Review: Kennedy's writing of family, the magical, and the terribly real have made him the finest American writer of his generation. Unfairly labeled a Regional writer; his writing is universal, timeless. Kennedy is the most well-rounded writer of literature to be writing since the days Hemingway and Fitzgerald roamed the globe.
Rating: 
Summary: Inside the mind of a homeless alcoholic
Review: You may have seen the movie. You may feel it evokes Albany, NY. But reading this gave me insight into the mind of my own homeless alcoholic, my younger brother.
Like the protaganist, my brother doesn't have to be homeless. But the requirements of the straight life are just too much.
Why would anyone choose this? How can my brother prefer sleeping outside in the cold, being dirty and hungry? He had a good job, was a homeowner, a husband, is still a father and grandfather.
William Kennedy has given me a clue. I'll never really get it, but Ironweed got me closer.
Rating: 
Summary: Down and Out in Albany
Review: I was a bit underwhelmed by this book- although that might have been part of the point. As it gives us a glimpse in to the tragic lives of a few locals, it also gives us a taste of their aimlessness, their rage, and their sorrow. You cannot help but sympathize for the characters (which almost feels condescending), but also it made me wonder: how close are all of us to the edge? What might happen in my life that might cause me to become lost? If anything, this story shows that no one can ever really know what their future holds, and that we should appreciate what we have because it could ALWAYS be worse.
Rating:
Summary: A Work of Art
Review: William Kennedy's Ironweed is a skillfully crafted work of art. Billy Phelan is an often-drunk, murderous bully and, at other times, a very compassionate and generous person. This is not an unusual combination. He is running from mistakes of the past, and creating new problems along the way. Billy is an unlikely likeable character, and we want him to overcome the ruinous side of his personality. The book successfully employs unusual literary devices and great metaphors. These literary devices include (1) the "living" dead in the cemetery, (2) the seemingly real ghosts that constantly haunt Billy Phelan, (3) temporary shift from past to conditional tense near the end of the book, and (4) the mixing of vivid memories into the current situation which tends to blur time and place. Kennedy composes many haunting metaphors. Here's one: "Helen now sees the spoiled seed of a woman's barren dream: a seed that germinates and grows into a shapeless, windblown weed blossom of no value to anything, even its own species, for it produces no seed of its own; a mutation that grows only into the lovely day like all other wild things, and then withers, and perishes, and falls, and vanishes."
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