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Chargement... City of Glass: Douglas Coupland's Vancouver (2000)par Douglas Coupland
Books Read in 2012 (556) Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Vancouver is a puzzle of a city of disparate neighbourhoods and vistas. A Canadian city Americans use to depict countless US cities in their TV dramas. Is it unique or is it generic? It jumbles European, Canadian, Asian and American influences into a strange mix. Vancouverite Douglas Coupland's style is ideally suited to capture these divergent elements in vignettes. The book is not a tour guide. To fully appreciate it, one probably has to have visited or lived in Vancouver. Then, one can compare one's recollections with Coupland's remarks and gaze at the pictures (often quirky private snapshots that would be weeded out in any professional endeavour). In alphabetic order, Coupland plunges into aspects of Vancouver, rambles, recollects, and explains with love and amusement. I am not sure if I know more about Vancouver having read his book, but it was an interesting ride and captures the flavour of the city well. Just like Souvenir of Canada, this is essentially a photo book with Coupland explaining/commenting/reflecting about the images. Whereas some of the images are truly great, for me as a Coupland fan, it's the text that makes this book marvelous - a lot of the texts are truly poetic. It is not a guide book, but I'd definitely call it recommended reading if you're going to Vancouver, as it highlights things you might otherwise miss. Of his normal books, I'd say that it mostly resembles Photographs from the dead, and should be enjoyable to those who liked that one. Coupland juxtaposes a city's quest for identity with the twentysomething's personal quest: it's all muddled and confused now, and sometimes it's even awful, but there's SO MUCH hope for the future. I really like seeing Vancouver (where I've never been, sadly) through Coupland's eyes. This is not a guidebook, but a personal tour by a somewhat funky (and therefore, awesome) friend who shows you patchwork pieces of the place which can then be made into the tapestry of your choosing. Mine has a lot of dangling threads, but I like it anyway. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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This irresistible little book offers a very different take on Vancouver, one of the world's most beautiful cities. Douglas Coupland applies his unique sensibility to everything from the Grouse Grind to glass towers, First Nations to feng shui, Kitsilano to Cantonese. Cleverly designed to mimic an underground Japanese magazine, this edition is fully updated and revised with riffs on Vancouver as a neon city, a land of treehuggers, and more. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)971.13304History and Geography North America Canada British Columbia Southwest Greater VancouverClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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It is a series of short essays on the aspects that Coupland thinks make Vancouver unique--the good and the bad--arranged in alphabetical order from "Backlot North" to "YVR" (the airport code). Included are lots of interesting and unusual pictures, many of them historical.
Of any writer I've come across yet, Coupland has the finest talent for capturing the exact feel of Vancouver. Perhaps I think that because we are around the same age and know a bunch of the same people. Still, Doug's Vancouver experience doesn't exactly mirror mine--maybe because he grew up in a different corner of the city than I, or perhaps because he's a male who had different interests. For example, I was completely unaware of the "ESL Pot Holiday," which is the experience of masses of Japanese and Korean students who are here under the cover of studying English, but instead just party in an "affordable, chaperone-free idyll before they enter Asia's corporate meat grinder." Not really a surprise, come to think about it, but new to me. Otherwise, I didn't learn a whole lot about my city, but instead enjoyed Coupland's witty observations and thoughtful perspective.
A quick, entertaining read.
As an aside, I find it amusing that LT's "Will You Like It?" feature predicted with high certainty that I wouldn't like this. I wonder where it got that idea! ( )