In this book, five members of a fictional Harvard class are traced through 25 tumultuous years - Danny Rosi, the musical prodigy who becomes a famous pianist and composer;
Ted Lambros who has a poor Italian family background but climbs to the top of the Harvard academic ladder;
Jason Gilbert, the Golden boy - handsome, charismatic, a brilliant athlete who tragically finds his true identity as a Jew;
George Keller, a refugee from Communist Hungary with the barest knowledge of English who masters not only the language but the power structure of his new country;
Andrew Eliot, a good sport who is haunted by three centuries of Harvard ancestors who cast giant shadows on his confidence but finally learns his value as a man;
and extraordinary women with whom their lives are intertwind.
These members of the Harvard Class of 1958 start in very different places, move together in Cambridge, and then move away and back together in their 25th Reunion.
Erich Segal’s books are always full of real locations and historical facts that make his stories totally believable, and his excellent command over the English language will expose you to floods of beautiful, intellectual and sophisticated English vocabulary.
However, the primary attraction of this book is that, after reading, you may feel a strange sense of fulfillment and achievement from within yourself as if you have lived five different lives!
Another selection, “Making Friends”, written by Andrew Mathew, is the book that I luckily came across during my trip to Singapore. Marked The Inter-national Bestseller, it looked very strange from the rest of the books displayed in the stand.
I felt as if a fun, pleasant acquaintance was standing there smiling at me among the very serious and solemn-looking people. Maybe it was because of the cartoon-like cover illustration, which seemed unusual for a book of ¡®self-improvement’. I immediately got attracted and started to read and, for the rest of the trip, I felt as if a smart, perceptive, as well as humorous friend was accompanying me all the way through.
This book is mostly about gentle philosophy of life and human relationship. We all know that good relationships require effort in both sides but most of us lapse into familiar ruts and patterns. This young, brilliant Austrian author with rich career as a professional portrait artist and cartoonist points out that our happiness hinges on attitude - attitude toward ourselves as well as others, work, effort, goals, failure, disappointment, pleasure, pain and the whole life puzzle and helps us to develop essential awareness and skills to give us more pleasure and less pain. He also uses exaggerated examples of human behaviors to illustrate his point, which add a touch of humor to the book.
I never thought it was possible to write on complex relations of human with such a simple language. Behavioral sciences have always been complex analysis which is not easy for average person to understand. This book will help you clear a lot of cobwebs in your mind about relation between two humans.
Cho Soon-jeong
Professor,
Dept. of General English
The UOS Times
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