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Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely brilliant, absolutely Vollmann
Review: I am roughly halfway through this tome, and I am happy to report that Vollmann's poetry is in full force here.
Rating:
Summary: my favorite book
Review: I can't summarize it any better than the newspaper reviews, so I'll merely talk about the experience of reading it. I actually finished the thing. Had it been a cheap volume, it might have been one of those things that sat on my shelf for years before I finally went through with it. However, I spent quite literally my last dime that I had at the time on it, so I was compelled. The key to finishing is taking breaks. I read 12 other books between the 8 months that it took me. Some reviews, and even Vollmann, suggested skipping around. I felt that was cheap, and wanted to experience the entire book, footnotes and all. I wrestled with it. It wasn't easy. However, the entire thing is coherent. There is a cohesive and consecutive flow to the volume that begs to be read in a linear fashion. I learned more about history than I did in an entire 24 years of schooling and existence while reading it, and felt genuinely bettered by the experience. I feel very certain that I will never read a book that is better or longer. When I finally finished, I felt a sense of relief. However, in the month that has passed since, I've sort of mourned the fact that I will never read it for the first time again. I'm sure that I'll come back to it in a decade or two, but it won't be the same. Even the mere sense of accomplishment that I felt in finishing Rising Up and Rising Down was worth the time that it took to read it. However, the true beauty was in what I learned and the awe that I experienced. While I will never read all of the books in the world, I feel confident in the fact that there is none as intricate. This is the best that an author can work towards. To me, it seems to be the pinnacle of the written word.
Rating:
Summary: Much like a wine cellar of experience.
Review: I've been working on RU&RD for some time now. After reading the excerpt in McSweeney's 7 a few years ago, then reading a few hundred pages of manuscript on the advance disc I recieved, then a little more when I actually bought my copy...and now a few hundred more pages over the last week or so. This is a long winded way of conveying that there is a richness that is present in this set of volumes by William T. Vollman that is unbelievable to behold & exciting to own.
I am so happy that I own a copy of this monumental book, and plan to keep it in a prominent position in my library to refer to as I desire. At first, I was thinking I would try to work through the book like any other, length be damned. But as time has worn on, I have taken Vollman's own advice to go to it when I want and read portions that I want...which has proven to be good advice. The book has so many layers, covers so broad a subject, it seems almost a crime to try & read it like a "normal" book from Vol. 1 through 6 (as well as the Moral Calculus). These books compliment any reading schedule that includes historical & other non-fiction works. As I float from book to book in my collection, I refer back to RU&RD for Vollmans experience or thoughts on some figure or idea. What makes the book so much more interesting than other historical studies is Vollman's fearless rendering of his feelings towards what he is writing about. This could be seen as dangerous, but one suspects that anyone buying this set of books has the ability to decide their position in relation to what they are reading. It is this relationship, between the reader's views and Vollman's in RU&RD, that makes reading this mammoth book so rewarding. I am so thankful to WTV for writing this, and to McSweeney's for publishing it when no one else would without compromise.
If you are just contemplating this purchase, stop. Buy the book now before it is no longer available...I think the abridged version that comes out this year will be a sad shadow of this full version.
Rating:
Summary: Much like a wine cellar of experience.
Review: I've been working on RU&RD for some time now. After reading the excerpt in McSweeney's 7 a few years ago, then reading a few hundred pages of manuscript on the advance disc I recieved, then a little more when I actually bought my copy...and now a few hundred more pages over the last week or so. This is a long winded way of conveying that there is a richness that is present in this set of volumes by William T. Vollman that is unbelievable to behold & exciting to own.
I am so happy that I own a copy of this monumental book, and plan to keep it in a prominent position in my library to refer to as I desire. At first, I was thinking I would try to work through the book like any other, length be damned. But as time has worn on, I have taken Vollman's own advice to go to it when I want and read portions that I want...which has proven to be good advice. The book has so many layers, covers so broad a subject, it seems almost a crime to try & read it like a "normal" book from Vol. 1 through 6 (as well as the Moral Calculus). These books compliment any reading schedule that includes historical & other non-fiction works. As I float from book to book in my collection, I refer back to RU&RD for Vollmans experience or thoughts on some figure or idea. What makes the book so much more interesting than other historical studies is Vollman's fearless rendering of his feelings towards what he is writing about. This could be seen as dangerous, but one suspects that anyone buying this set of books has the ability to decide their position in relation to what they are reading. It is this relationship, between the reader's views and Vollman's in RU&RD, that makes reading this mammoth book so rewarding. I am so thankful to WTV for writing this, and to McSweeney's for publishing it when no one else would without compromise.
If you are just contemplating this purchase, stop. Buy the book now before it is no longer available...I think the abridged version that comes out this year will be a sad shadow of this full version.
Rating:
Summary: Readable, beautifuly bound and excellent photos
Review: My experience reading RU&RD was more conventional; I read the volumes straight through. I have 2 hours of commuting on the subway each day so I get a lot of reading done. I started in May and finished volume seven in August with one month off while I was on vacation. I never found it tedious or repetitive. If one topic did not particularly excite me he would be on to another in 5 or 10 pages.
The binding and slipcase is gorgeous. When my copy first arrived the slipcase had been damaged, but McSweeney's shipped me a new case free of charge- and I didn't even buy it from them.
The only thing I can add which has not been covered by other reviewers is the photography. Vollman includes a couple dozen photos in each volume- i believe all of which he shot himself. They include shots of a friend of his who had just been killed by a sniper, a woman in columbia pointing to a bloodstain where her daughter was slain, child soldiers in Burma. I found the photos helped reinforced the reality of the exotic and often novelistically rendered personal experiences he offers in the second half of the book. I really enjoyed them.
The other thing I find amazing is that Vollman is working on another seven volume book about the 'symbolic history of north america.' I would have thought this would be considered a lifes work.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely brilliant, absolutely Vollmann
Review: Something that I haven't seen in any of the reviews of Vollmann's book is this: "Am I going to want to read it?" After all, if you're spendng $120 or so on the thing, and you're interested in more that just looking at it on your bookshelf, it should be considered. Sure, Vollmann has written an important book by all accounts, but that doesn't mean I'm going to read it. Or even a quarter of it. Well, good news: Rising Up Rising Down is very readable; moreso I think that his recent novel Argall, on which I remain stuck on around page 350. The book does get heavy of course in its theories and efforts to explore the connections it needs to make. But the chapters themselves are usually very short, and few examples in it last so long that you lose interest. A few more pages and he'll be talking about something else in a different country and different time. I raced through the first volume, and half of the second. At that point I got sidetracked with some other things, but I can't wait to get back into it. In many cases you actually get nice short versions of difficult to understand historical events. For example, one hundred pages on what happened in the early Soviet Union when farms were turned into state owned collectives and the famine that resulted is actually much easir to read than a 500 page book on the topic, Frankly that's enough for me, and if I want to know more about it beyond that, Vollmann gives me a list of plenty of other books to check out on the topic as well. I'll leave it to others to go into the strengths and shortcomings of this book. What I wanted to do here is just encourage people who are on the fence about buying this thing to not be discouraged by its length or topic or bewildering talk of Vollmann's "moral calculus." It is in fact a very interesting read, and the fact that you learn a lot at the same time hasn't hurt me a bit.
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