Penguin Books, 2006. 482 pages. There are no marks or writing in the book No reading crease on the spine. Spine is tight and there are no loose pages. Small chip and small tear top edge of front cover. Shelf wear bottom of front cover. Wear to the corners. . First Edition. Soft Cover. Good +/No Jacket. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

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

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Tight: Used to mean that the binding of a book has not been overly loosened by frequent use.
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....
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