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The Road to Wellville

The Road to Wellville

The Road to Wellville
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The Road to Wellville

by T. C. Boyle

  • Used
  • Very Good
  • Hardcover
  • Signed
  • first
Condition
Very Good/Very Good
ISBN 10
0670843342
ISBN 13
9780670843343
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About This Item

The Viking Press, 1993-01-01. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 6x1x9. Signed by Author. Signed by author on half title page. Minor wear with bumps & scuffs to boards. Light wear & soiling on edges of text block. Text and images unmarked. Dj lightly shelf worn with scuffs, creases & small tears around edges in a mylar cover.

Synopsis

Will Lightbody is a man with a stomach ailment whose only sin is loving his wife, Eleanor, too much. Eleanor is a health nut of the first stripe, and when in 1907 she journeys to Dr. John Harvey Kellogg's infamous Battle Creek Spa to live out the vegetarian ethos, poor Will goes too. So begins T. Coraghessan Boyle 's wickedly comic look at turn-of-the-century fanatics in search of the magic pill to prolong their lives--or the profit to be had from manufacturing it. Brimming with a Dickensian cast of characters and laced with wildly wonderful plot twists, Jane Smiley in the New York Times Book Review called The Road to Wellville "A marvel, enjoyable from beginning to end."

Reviews

On Mar 7 2010, Feeney said:
T. C. Boyle's 1993 novel, THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE, is about a (fictional) murder. It is not, however, a murder mystery. It is the story of John Harvey Kellogg, M.D., health perfectionist and guide to others, who cannot accept that he has produced a less than perfect 20 year old in his adopted son George Kellogg. So John Harvey drowns George, with good cause, in a thousand pounds of costly, experimental macadamia butter, "fragrant sloshing unguent froth, baptizing him, purifying him" (Part III, Ch. 10). "... George was an experiment that hadn't worked. ... When an experiment went bad, you had to move on to the next one." When others came to the death scene in the experimental kitchen, Dr Kellogg told them, "'I tried to save him,' he choked, 'and then he said no more.'" His word was accepted and no blame was ever attached to the doctor who had invented various dry cereals, who had preached the health-delivering wonders of nuts, colonic irrigation and breathing radium. He had, we are forced to concede, tried all George's life to "save him." It just hadn't worked. So Kellogg moved on. *****Over and over in this novel, this truly great historical figure, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, is shown to have failed. He could not stop a patient at his Battle Creek Sanatarium, C. W. Post from stealing recipes from Kellogg's office safe and becoming rich through inventing Postum, Grape Nuts and Post Toasties. In every box of Postum, C. W. Post included a little health pamphlet he had written called "The Road to Wellville." *****Dr. Kellogg could not talk wealthy young (30-ish) Will and Eleanor Lighibody out of having sex (very bad for anyone's health) and out of leaving his health regime to return to "the world." Kellogg did succeed in wresting control of the Battle Creek Health Temple away from his patroness, Seventh-Day Adventists founder Sister Ellen G. White. He gradually replaced the originally all Adventist staff. He stopped attending Adventist services. But he remained enmeshed in Mrs. White's ideas about corset-free waists for women, giving up tobacco and alcoholic spirits and not tasting the flesh of animals. *****Another failure: Dr. Kellogg did prevent Charlie Ossining, a young disciple of the ideas of C. W. Post, from getting rich making a cereal marketed as Kellogg's by virtue of enlisting young George Kellogg as a partner. But toward novel's end, a drunken George introduced Charlie to Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, 15 % alcohol. Later, at far lower start-up costs than his failed effort with breakfast cereal, Charlie Ossining remembered Lydia Pinkham's and created Per-To ("Perfect Tonic") with 40% alcohol ("Added Solely as a Solvent and Preservative"). Dr Kellogg would not have been amused. He became a multi-millionaire. *****THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE is funny, on every page. It makes us laugh and laugh again. And laughter, we are taught by French philosopher Henri Bergson is our reaction to an "imperfection which calls for an immediate corrective." Dr. John Harvey Kellogg strives to be perfect in every dimension, not just in healthy living, but as mentor, hospital administrator and lecturer. And he thinks he is perfect. But he is not. Everything he does is exaggerated, out of phase with his deepest, sanest nature: that which he was meant to be. He and the Lighfoots, Charlie Ossining and others all remind us of conditioned reflexes, robots, rats on a treadmill or running a maze. They don't have to be so eccentric. Their imperfections are "immediately correctible." But they are either slow learners or they learn the wrong things. -OOO-

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Details

Bookseller
Chaparral Books US (US)
Bookseller's Inventory #
PARSboyRTW
Title
The Road to Wellville
Author
T. C. Boyle
Format/Binding
Hardcover
Book Condition
Used - Very Good
Jacket Condition
Very Good
Quantity Available
1
Edition
First Edition
ISBN 10
0670843342
ISBN 13
9780670843343
Publisher
The Viking Press
Place of Publication
New York
Date Published
1993-01-01
Size
6x1x9
X weight
30 oz

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About the Seller

Chaparral Books

Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Biblio member since 2015
Portland, Oregon

About Chaparral Books

Chaparral Books is located across from Elephant's Deli on S Corbett Avenue in Portland. We have a well rounded collection of subjects, including an extensive core collection in Western Americana and Native American Literature including Western Writers.

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Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:

Text Block
Most simply the inside pages of a book. More precisely, the block of paper formed by the cut and stacked pages of a book....
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...
Half Title
The blank front page which appears just prior to the title page, and typically contains only the title of the book, although, at...
Edges
The collective of the top, fore and bottom edges of the text block of the book, being that part of the edges of the pages of a...
Title Page
A page at the front of a book which may contain the title of the book, any subtitles, the authors, contributors, editors, the...
Bumps
Indicates that the affected part of the book has been impacted in such a way so as to cause a flattening, indention, or light...

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