Oh The Glory of It All
by Sean Wilsey
- Used
- Paperback
- first
- Condition
- Good +/No Jacket
- ISBN 10
- 0143036912
- ISBN 13
- 9780143036913
- Seller
-
Rockaway Beach, Missouri, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Synopsis
"In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess." With these opening lines Sean Wilsey takes us on an exhilarating tour of life in the strangest, wealthiest, and most grandiose of families. Sean's blond-bombshell mother (one of the thinly veiled characters in Armistead Maupin's bestselling Tales of the City ) is a 1980s society-page staple, regularly entertaining Black Panthers and movie stars in her marble and glass penthouse, "eight hundred feet in the air above San Francisco; an apartment at the top of a building at the top of a hill: full of light, full of voices, full of windows full of water and bridges and hills." His enigmatic father uses a jet helicopter to drop Sean off at the video arcade and lectures his son on proper hygiene in public restrooms, "You should wash your hands first, before you use the urinal. Not after. Your penis isn't dirty. But your hands are." When Sean, "the kind of child who sings songs to sick flowers," turns nine years old, his father divorces his mother and marries her best friend. Sean's life blows apart. His mother first invites him to commit suicide with her, then has a "vision" of salvation that requires packing her Louis Vuitton luggage and traveling the globe, a retinue of multiracial children in tow. Her goal: peace on earth (and a Nobel Prize). Sean meets Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl, Menachem Begin, and the pope, hoping each one might come back to San Francisco and persuade his father to rejoin the family. Instead, Sean is pushed out of San Francisco and sent spiraling through five high schools, till he finally lands at an unorthodox reform school cum "therapeutic community," in Italy. With its multiplicity of settings and kaleidoscopic mix of preoccupations-sex, Russia, jet helicopters, seismic upheaval, boarding schools, Middle Earth, skinheads, home improvement, suicide, skateboarding, Sovietology, public transportation, massage, Christian fundamentalism, dogs, Texas, global thermonuclear war, truth, evil, masturbation, hope, Bethlehem, CT, eventual salvation (abridged list)— Oh the Glory of It All is memoir as bildungsroman as explosion.
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Details
- Bookseller
- First Class Used Books (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 012624
- Title
- Oh The Glory of It All
- Author
- Sean Wilsey
- Format/Binding
- Paperback
- Book Condition
- Used - Good +
- Jacket Condition
- No Jacket
- Edition
- First Edition
- ISBN 10
- 0143036912
- ISBN 13
- 9780143036913
- Publisher
- Penguin Books
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 2006
- Size
- 8vo - over 7¾" - 9&f
Terms of Sale
First Class Used Books
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Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- Shelf Wear
- Shelf wear (shelfwear) describes damage caused over time to a book by placing and removing a book from a shelf. This damage is...
- Tight
- Used to mean that the binding of a book has not been overly loosened by frequent use.
- First Edition
- In book collecting, the first edition is the earliest published form of a book. A book may have more than one first edition in...
- Spine
- The outer portion of a book which covers the actual binding. The spine usually faces outward when a book is placed on a shelf....