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This location presents Arizona Braille and Talking Book Readers
with book summaries and reviews suggested by our readers, staff, and volunteers.

(Writer’s note:) In today’s times of weight watching, exercise clubs, personal athletic trainers, health foods, yoga, bottled water, and other trendy health fads, it’s easy to think we are the first trend setters in finding a healthier way to live.  We forget that in the early 1900s both the U.S. and Europe were encountering a like phenomenon.

Similar to the present, there were a host of “get rich quick” entrepreneurs attempting to capitalize on the public’s new obsession.  Now it’s tap water in plastic bottles for over a dollar per shot but in the early 1900s it was breakfast foods and health retreats.  The center of this new craze was Battle Creek, Michigan and the key players were Charlie Post and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.

New cereals and health sanctuaries were popping up like spring flowers and this little known berg was catching the attention of the rich and famous throughout the world! In The Road To Wellville by T. Coraghessan Boyle the reader is given a front row seat in experiencing this unique social and financial event that in many ways reflects the present.

ROAD TO WELLVILLE
RC 40674
by T Coraghessan Boyle
Four cassettes
Narrated by Conrad Feininger

FROM THE BOOK JACKET

“The year is 1907, and the boom town of Battle Creek, Michigan, is attracting a formidable array of visitors – the rich, the preposterously rich, and the merely famous, from California, Chicago, New York, and even Europe.  What draws them to this place?  And what inspires them to trade in their steaks and oysters, their martini’s and champagne, for a diet of bran and yogurt and a regimen of five enemas per day?  Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of course, inventor of the corn flake, peanut butter, and the coffee substitutes that have ruined so many a bright morning, the man whose dietary wisdom is at your disposal in this comic masterpiece by T. Coraghessan Boyle.

The Road To Wellville overflows with a Dickensian cast of characters – all in search of the magic pill to prolong their lives, or the profit to be had from manufacturing it.  The hapless hero of this pursuit is Will Lightbody, a man with an undiagnosed stomach ailment whose only sin is loving his wife too much.  For Eleanor Lightbody, despite her upper-crust credentials, her capability and beauty, is a health nut of the first stripe, and when she travels to Dr. Kellogg’s ‘Temple of Health’ to live out the vegetarian ethos with a vengeance, so too does poor Will.

Boyle’s amazing novel offers much more than a care for pernicious maladies – it will make you howl with delighted recognition as you discover the root and basis for the catechism of today’s food police.  It will also give you a look at the boom industry that made the little burg of Battle Creek known around the world, and introduce you to the hustlers and confidence men who came to town to profit from the public’s credulity.  And it will give you adventure along with a good dollop of comic instruction in the mysteries of the prescriptive diet and evils of sex ( Dr. Kellogg believed in abstaining – for life.).

Boyle has been compared with Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, Dickens, and Evelyn Waugh.  Imagine an amalgam of them all, overlaid with the wicked modern comic sensibility that has make this flamboyant author the rising star of American literature.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Currently the author has published over eleven novels and more than 60 major short stories.  His awards include the Pen/Faulkner award in 1988 for his third novel World’s End (RC 27116 on three cassettes and narrated by Edward Blake), which is a family saga that covers over 300 years in upstate New York, the Pen/Malamud Prize, the Pen/West Literary Prize, the Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the National Academy of Arts and Letters Award for prose excellence as well as six O. Henry Awards for short fiction.  His novel Drop City (RC 55862 on three cassettes and narrated by Steven Carpenter) about a group of misfits who head off to Alaska to establish a commune, was a National Book Award Finalist.

Boyle earned his BA in English and history from the State University of New York at Potsdam in 1968.  He was accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1972 and received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988.  The author had already earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1977 and his Ph.D. degree in 19th century British literature in 1977.

He was born in Peekskill, New York which is a small town in the Hudson Valley that he fictionalizes as Peterskill, New York.  The author is married, lives in Santa Barbara, California, has three children, and has been a member of The University of Southern California’s English Department since 1978.

ABOUT THE NARRATOR

When first researching the background of Conrad Feininger it was easy to determine that he had a top-notch acting career.  Being the recipient of the Helen Hayes Outstanding Supporting Actor Award in 2004 and having excellent reviews in the New York Times for his acting roles as Macbeth and Louis the 18th,  there was little doubt about his thespian prowess.  However, I could find little about his personal life.

In desperation I asked Sandra Everett, our Deputy Director, for help.  She sent an email to his recording studio and I was delighted to receive an email from Conrad.  The following is taken directly from his response: “I am the son and grandson of visual artists – painters actually – my grandfather was one of the founders of the Bauhaus school in Germany, and my father has been a painter for 70 years. Thus, an artistic career is very much a family ‘norm,’ although I am the first actor in the family.  When not acting I am a serious amateur photographer, an avid inline skater and proud parent to two great dogs with my wife of almost 25 years.  Incidentally Wellville has a fond place in my heart – it was the first fiction I recorded for the Library.”

READER CRITIQUE

Perhaps one of the best characteristics of a fictional novel based on past history is the ability of the author to create characters that signify the cultural and sociological aspects of a particular moment in time.  When the writer can successfully accomplish the above the reader is literally lifted from the present and dropped into the past.  For you to really be touched by a historical fiction novel, it must be made personal through solid character development.  This is precisely why writers like Homer, Dickens, Hugo, Twain, and Steinbeck have become eternal literary figures.

It is this reader’s opinion that you can add T. Coraghessan Boyle to the esteemed list of writers who have become literary giants by bringing a moment in time alive through fantastic character development! The affluent socially established Will and Eleanor Lightbody, Dr. Kellogg and his infamous son, the aspiring get rich quick entrepreneur Charlie Ossining and his wealthy upper class benefactor Mrs. Amelia Hookstratten, and a host of real historical figures such as President Teddy Roosevelt and C.W. Post will make the early 1900s come alive.

You will literally sense the social, cultural, and even natural setting of Battle Creek, Michigan.  Its formidable winters, health retreats, breakfast cereal factories, local residents all come alive in Road To Wellville.

In short, T.Coraghessan Boyle is simply a magician.  He waves his pen like a magic wand and literally pulls you into a historical moment.  By artfully studying the history he writes about, he is able to give his human players personalities that so reflect their times that you are there!!  Like the greats before him, this author will live on in literary history as he imprints memorable characters that will never be forgotten.

NARRATOR REVIEW

Despite Boyle’s artful literary skills, his work would all be for naught without the thespian narrative skills of Conrad Feininger.   With cadence, unbelievable voice enthusiasm, magnificent tonal variations – but never whispering or dropping off at the end of sentences, this narrator takes you into the personalities and lives of the protagonists.  What is so unbelievable is that the narrator says The Road To Wellville was his first fictional read.  Feininger’s skills at setting the scenes and moods of the major players through his narration are so wonderful, you would think he had been narrating fiction for years!!  

(Comments and questions regarding “BookTalk” should be
directed to Reader Advisement Librarian Henry Hayden at hhayden@lib.az.us)

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Updated: 09/18/2007

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