Panama - Hardcover

McGuane, Thomas

  • 3.74 out of 5 stars
    685 ratings by Goodreads
 
9780374229429: Panama

Synopsis

PanamaAuthor: Thomas McGuaneTitle: PanamaPublication: Farrar, Straus and GirouxEdition: FIRST EDITIONDescription: First Edition, First Printing. Not price-clipped. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. Octavo. Hardcover. Book is very good with previous owner's inscription on 2nd blank page. Dust jacket is very good with shelf wear and sticker on back cover. 100% positive feedback. 30 day money back guarantee. NEXT DAY SHIPPING! Excellent customer service. Please email with any questions. All books packed carefully and ship with free delivery confirmation/tracking. All books come with free bookmarks. Ships from Sag Harbor, New York.Seller ID: 359494Subject: Literature We Buy Books! Collections - Libraries - Estates - Individual Titles. Message us if you have books to sell!

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About the Author

Eric Zencey is a professor of history at Goddard College in Vermont and a contributing editor of North American Review. This is his first novel.

From Publishers Weekly

This is that extremely rare find, a first novel that is not only extremely accomplished but also quite unlike anything else. It daringly places a real person?American historian and philosopher Henry Adams?into a historic situation?the scandal in 1892 Paris over the corrupt collapse of the grand Panama Canal plan?and makes of it a dashing, sometimes touching and, yes, thoughtful thriller. Adams is sketched quickly and deftly: enterprising, sensitive, observant, still mourning the suicide of his wife years earlier, half in love with beautiful Elizabeth Cameron. We see him briefly in Panama, stealing a picture that will come to be significant; at Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (naturally), where he is much taken with a young American painter, Miriam, who seems like a new breath in his life, and to whom he becomes quickly, quixotically attached; finally in Paris, where Miriam instantly disappears, is perhaps dead. At once, Adams begins to search for her, becoming involved with Parisian police, including a fledgling fingerprint expert and his young nephew; a coroner is killed, a macabre gift arrives for Adams via a pneumatique and the political plot around the Panama scandal, which could bring down a government and create a new one, thickens. At the heart of it all, Adams barges ahead like a gallant detective with the mind of an aesthete; through his eyes Paris, on the brink of the modern age, has never seemed stranger or more alluring, its people more enigmatic. That Zencey can create a headlong read, with a piercing climax and a poignant final note, out of such esoteric material is almost miraculous. A wonderful debut. 100,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB selections.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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