Our Town

Rating:
Summary: ordinary but special
Review: This book is read in a really short time but it takes you longer to get over it, meaning Thorton Wilder provokes with his easy sentences heaps of thoughts which you might already have had, but they just get deeper - Anyway, this ordinary town with its ordinary inhabitants shows us life how it is in its roots: Birth-marriage-death. You might think that there's so much more and there is but you have all the freedom to invent it. In this ordinariness you will see your own town, your neighbors, your doctor and maybe even yourself.

Rating:
Summary: good and bad at the same time
Review: It's about normal family life, about being born, getting married and dying. How boring is that if you think about it at first. Just another every-day-story. But the way it is written and being played makes it all up. It is totally different to all the other books I have ever read. I only finished the play because of this very reason. You can imagine your own landscape to the story, you can imagine yourself how "your town" is gonna look like, and that makes it interesting especially for yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Getting better and better
Review: Our Town is not just a usual play, it's a play in a play! The stage manager leads us through the performance by giving us information about the little village of Grover's Corner and its inhabitants. Even if I found his speeches and monologues a bit too long, I can say that I liked the book as a whole. Reading it gave me new points of view of our life. I would say it's a play dedicated to life. We should appreciate every moment of it and care for our family and friends, that's the message Thornton Wilder wants to give us. I can recommend it to anybody who doesn't stop reading a book if he doesn't find it thrilling after the first few pages! It's one of the books that are getting better and better the longer you keep on reading. So read it!

Rating:
Summary: Not really my thing
Review: We've read 'Our Town' in English class. At the beginning I read it enthusiastically but unfortunately only the first few pages. Then it seemed to me so boring that I really had to overpower myself to go on reading. The first and the second act just describe places of the play, persons and their daily life. Only the third act did I find interesting again. Why? Because it has one clear message for me. Look at your life, make it better by respecting every little thing, because no one lives forever.

Rating:
Summary: We have all different but similar lives.
Review: First I wasn't too excited as I heard that we had to read a book in our English class. But I still I had to, and so I started reading it. I actually I wanted to read only up to the page that we were assigned to. But after a while I became engrossed in the play. I can't explain why but it touched my own life somehow. I felt as if Wilder had written the play about my own life, any ordinary normal life. He tells us the story about people that live like everyone else and about situations that we are all likely to be in some day or other. After all we are all human beings with different but similar life-styles, thoughts and opinions about something like death, marriage, love happens to all of us and therefore we all have to think about these issues no matter who we are.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: My school just finished the production of Wilder's "Our Town" -- in which I participated. I believe it is one of the most wonderfully and simply complex dramas ever -- but yes, of course my opinion is biast.

Rating:
Summary: not what i expected
Review: When we began to read this in school I thought it would be a fascinating story about something extraordinary that occurs in a small town. As I later found out it was about normal, ordinary, plain, bland everyday life. The message and story were wonderful but slow. Not a good book for a reader who likes action. This is best for people who are patient and enjoy seeking the deeper meaning in a book. I did love the paradox of the adress on the envelope that Rebecca is explaining to George. If you get by how plain the people's lives were I think you shall find this to be a wonderful book with the a wonderful message:just because life is ordinary it doesn't mean it's not special.

Rating:
Summary: Horrible Experience with this format
Review: This is more a review of the process of getting the book, than the actual read. After being prompted to download Adobe's E-book Reader, no file exists on Adobe's servers. Checking the User-to-User forum there, the reader software is apparently fraught with problems, none of which have been addressed. I suspect that Adobe has pulled the software from its site and failed to inform the rest of the world.

Rating:
Summary: Love Town
Review: I marked Our Town as 'Love town' because through reading this novel it seems as though Wilder is trying to portray what most see as the picture perfect American World. Wilder portrays the characters as being the perfect loving family and community when the real world is unfortunately violent, disrespectful, and pretty much the opposite of Wilder's picture portrayed in his writings.
I do commend Wilder for his writings because his writings are portraying what we wish the world would be like to some extent.
As with all books and authors Wilder has many ups and downs in his works.
T. Lynn, Tiffin, Ohio USA

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: Our Town excises the fat, breaks down the fourth wall, wrecks havoc with form to say three things, as plainly and as movingly as possible: our time in this world is limited, who you loved and who loved you is all that matters at the end, and that end is inevitable.

Simply beautiful.