Time and Again by Jack Finney Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Time and Again
Book Review: A Great Time Travel Book describing the 1800's.
Summary: 5 Stars
This book was imaginative enough to make you wonder if you did the research as the characters in the book did, could you time travel.
The details of the 1870's time period covered was wonderful.
The details of the movements and what the characters felt during this time, took you completely away from the current time.
If you want a book to relax with this would be the book.
It is also a good tool for learning the 1870 time period in history.Book Review: A Masterpiece of Atmosphere.
Summary: 5 Stars
The story is magical. The settings are magical. And the characters are real. They will live with you as long as you live and you will search in vain for another book that will surpass this one. Search in vain for I doubt that any other novel of the last 50 years is as fully realized as thisBook Review: A Minority View
Summary: 3 Stars
The volume I read had 400 pages, of which at least 200 were descriptions of old-time New York City, seemingly down to the last brick. The balance between description and plot was therefore significantly tilted to description, and I must therefore admit I skimmed portions of the book as a result. In summary, I found this a tedius read which could have greatly benefited from 100 pages of editing.Book Review: A Modern Classic
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is excellent! The author creates a rich world of New York during the 1880's. The scenes are vivid and the author adds photos and drawings that really give a sense of reality. I am a native New Yorker and learned a great deal about my own city such as not knowing that the arm of the Statue of Liberty was sitting for a long time in a public park.The book flows well throughout. The only thing that prevented me from giving it 5 stars was the method the author used for the time travel. However, if we consider the book a classic and accept it for what it is, you can easily accept the method given.
I understand that there is a sequel to this book and I will be ordering it from my library.
Book Review: A One-of-a-Kind Book
Summary: 5 Stars
To get it straight at the start, Jack Finney's novel Time and Again is not a great work of literature; it's an amiable and charming, if peculiar, rather lightweight hybrid of at least three genres--the mystery/spy/government-conspiracy novel, the historical romance and the nostalgic travelogue, with a short bow in the direction of science-fiction. It is not a definitive novel of time-travel; its method of changing eras is not far from squeezing your eyes really tightly together and tapping your heels together three times, though the theoretical basis is just a smidgen sounder than for Dorothy in Oz. It is not a great romance, though it is romantic. It is not even science fiction--well, okay, okay, to be kind, Finney's straight-faced use of Relativity theory allows it to barely squeeze under the fence into the field. Its plot is flimsy, with more holes than the Detroit infield, and some of its characters are mostly cardboard cut-outs to be moved here and there by the stage-hands moving the plot along. And you know what? I loved every silly, odd, funny, charming, implausible, exciting, interesting, occasionally poignant page of it.Why? Because rarely will you find a book where it's so obvious that the author had as much sheer fun writing 'Time and Again' as you'll have reading it. His protagonist, Simon Morley, keeps using words such as 'excited", "pleased" and 'glad' and phrases like "happy to be here" throughout the book, the book is full of happily excited people, and it's clear Morley's a fictional rubber-necking time tourist through which Finney has the time of his life swanning vicariously around the now-vanished hotels and theaters and civic buildings of Old New York. It's more than just travelogue, though. Finney was able to catch the details of day-to-day life for all these now-vanished people, known to us now only by old sepia photographs and antique knickknacks and a few old buildings which have escaped the demolishers. But then, it was their world, as familiar as ours is to us: that's where they lived their lives. Well, we'll be known the same way one day, after all--our day-to-day is going to be someone else's history up ahead, and in 'Time and Again', everyone wonders and asks Morley, what was it like, back then? what was it really *like*?
As a science-fiction author, Finney never showed all that much interest in the future but was fascinated with and nostalgic for the past, in particular what came to be called 'The Good Years' for America and the industrialised world, a golden-afternoon period of increasing world prosperity based on accelerating technological progress and an uncrowded world at relative peace, its resources yet to be depleted--at least for the burgeoning middle-class and higher--beginning about 1880 and coming to a calamitous end in 1914. Through 'Time and Again' and his other time-travel novels and stories, it's clear that Finney mourned the loss of that world (as who wouldn't?), seeing the First and Second World Wars as hideous deviations from humanity's real path, one that we resumed, too briefly, between the late 1980's and September 11 2001.
That the past and its people actually existed and still exist somewhere to be visited is a theme throughout much of Finney's short stories. His collection, 'About Time', collects a number of overtly time-travel stories, and another, 'I Love Galesburg in the Springtime', contains the nifty eponymous time-travel story as well as other science fictional themes). Besides 'Time and Again', at least two of his novels are explicitly about time-travel: its darker sequel, 'From Time to Time', which contains a chapter, in the opinion of this unworthy one, which is alone worth the price of the book, mostly just a front-porch conversation between several people on a hot New York summer evening, it's a loving evocation of daily life in the wide community of vaudeville performers and just may have been the best single piece of writing that Finney ever did, and an out-of-print novel called 'Marion's Wall', a lovely, funny ghost story in which a silent-movie queen who died relatively young comes into the lives of a modern (1970's) Hollywood couple--in it, Finney evokes the Silver Screen era as it impinges on, and occasionally collides with, the modern day.
The plot of 'Time and Again' revolves around-- nawwww, it's really not that important. Really. Just go read the book. As long as you don't demand it to be Great Literature, you'll have a great time. And, like me, you'll probably recommend it to everyone you know as a 'Hey, ya gotta read this!' book, and re-read it yourself from time to time. Enjoy!