Discount Price: $5.99
Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780764586675
ISBN number: 076458667X
Label: Cliffs Notes
Manufacturer: Cliffs Notes
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 128
Printing Date: December 04, 2000
Publishing house: Cliffs Notes
Sale Popularity Level: 626646
Studio: Cliffs Notes
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The original CliffsNotes study guides offer expert commentary on major themes, plots, characters, literary devices, and historical background. The latest generation of titles in this series also features glossaries and visual elements that complement the classic, familiar format.
CliffsNotes on Beloved sheds light on Toni Morrison’s skill in penetrating the unconstrained, unapologetic inner motivations of numerous characters who shouldered the horrific burden of slavery’s hidden sins. Less a suspense novel than a treatise on acceptance and endurance, this novel has struck an appreciative chord with those who value the painful process of creating a guilt-ridden, near-crazed survivor.
With help from this study guide, you’ll not only survive – you’ll thrive in your understanding of Morrison’s memorable work. You’ll also find valuable information about the author and her influences. Other features that help you study include
Classic literature or modern modern-day treasure — you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides.
Amazon.com Review:
In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved.
A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many fine novels, including Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise--but Beloved is arguably her best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a subject so familiar that it is almost impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichéd nor melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, she manages to encapsulate all of slavery's many cruelties into one apt symbol--a device that deprives its wearer of speech. 'Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye.' Most importantly, the language here, while often lyrical, is never overheated. Even as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative without being overemotional: 'Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft--hiding close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen.... And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now.' Even the supernatural is treated as an ordinary fact of life: 'Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby,' comments Sethe's mother-in-law.
Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by. --Alix Wilber
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
Beloved / 0-452-28062-1
Beloved is not for everyone (most books aren't), but if you cherish the tradition of rich symbolism given to us by such masters as Hawthorne and Poe, you may well love Beloved.
Beloved tells the languorous story of the set-upon Sethe, an ex-slave who has endured the worst hardships life can offer. Having lost a child, she feels deeply burdened with the guilt of the death, her feelings of failure as a mother, even her regret that she could not procure a more elaborate grave marker for her dear baby. When a mysterious girl arrives, seeming to embody the ghostly spirit of the lost child, Sethe clings to the girl in an endeavor to salvage some forgiveness for her past sins. As the girl grows stronger every day, she seems to leach Sethe's own spirit and Sethe withers away, to the sorrow of her friends and loved ones. The rich symbolism is so heavily redolent of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, only here the shame is directed (however unfairly) inwardly, rather than from outside forces. Beloved is, at the heart of it, a wonderful novel of how destructive our guilt and pain can be, when we allow it purchase.
Rated by buyers 
-
Amazon.com great company to buy from. Prices, shipping, etc.
I was expecting a bit more in the book beings the movie was so good, did not hold my interest, but the price was good.
Rated by buyers 
-
Beloved HAD to be written. The African-American tragedy is told here in a way that the slaves could not have articulated themselves - but here their souls cry out. True, Toni Morrison does not quite make this a total work of Art. The devices are too obvious as she fulfills this almost impossible task she has set herself. In this book you LIVE the destruction/denigration of life - in a way I cannot remember experiencing in any other book. The characters, especially Beloved, are symbols - and yet they are very real and quite fascinating too! These are vibrant, exciting people - and Morrison gives them a voice and makes them so real!
Rated by buyers -
I read this book after reading The Known World and March so I had already had a good (better, actually) dose of reading about the inhumane conditions slaves lived under. This was a ho-hum book for me. I thought it was more work that it was worth and I wanted it over with and was glad when I finished it.
I was really struck by Morrison taking you inside the damaged spirit of some of the characters. You learn how they only let themselves love others a little as all things important to them will likely be taken away. You learn the significance of a star or a leaf to someone who has no joy in their life whatsoever. You come to understand why a mother would rather take the life of her child than subject it to a life of continuous degradation and misery.
Rated by buyers -
Get a peek of what is to come subsequent in this novel without knowing you're seeing the future. Morrison's artistic lyrics are outstanding.
Find other books like this one:
