New York: Penguin Press. Very Good in Good dust jacket. 2005. Fourth Printing. Hardcover. 1594200513 . Book is Very Good. Clean and unmarked text. Tight and sturdy binding. Light spine end bumps. A single light front cover bottom edge bump. Front cover spine edge 1/4 inch surface dent. Last end page has very light surface soiling to front edge. DJ is good. Some light bumping and some wear to DJ cover corners and edges. Small DJ spine end edges chipping. Some DJ edge and corner chipping. Back DJ surface has some small surface scratches. Very light surface shelf wear to DJ cover. Front DJ small price sticker. ; 482 pages .

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: Never Enough Stuff (US)
Bookseller's Inventory #: 4715
Title: OH THE GLORY OF IT ALL
Author: Wilsey, Sean
Format/Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Used - Very Good in Good dust jacket
Edition: Fourth Printing
ISBN 10: 1594200513
ISBN 13: 9781594200519
Publisher: Penguin Press
Place of Publication: New York
Date Published: 2005
Keywords: 1594200513
Bookseller catalogs: Fiction;

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Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:

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...
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...
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...
Chipping: A defect in which small pieces are missing from the edges; fraying or small pieces of paper missing the edge of a paperback, or...
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....
Jacket: Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
Tight: Used to mean that the binding of a book has not been overly loosened by frequent use.