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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 ROBBINS | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 813.54 ROB | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Internationally bestselling novelist and American icon Tom Robbins delivers the long awaited tale of his wild life and times, both at home and around the globe.
Tom Robbins' warm, wise, and wonderfully weird novels--including Still Life With Woodpecker, Jitterbug Perfume, and Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates--provide an entryway into the frontier of his singular imagination. Madcap but sincere, pulsating with strong social and philosophical undercurrents, his irreverent classics have introduced countless readers to natural born hitchhiking cowgirls, born-again monkeys, a philosophizing can of beans, exiled royalty, and problematic redheads.
In Tibetan Peach Pie, Robbins turns that unparalleled literary sensibility inward, stitching together stories of his unconventional life, from his Appalachian childhood to his globetrotting adventures --told in his unique voice that combines the sweet and sly, the spiritual and earthy. The grandchild of Baptist preachers, Robbins would become over the course of half a century a poet-interruptus, an air force weatherman, a radio dj, an art-critic-turned-psychedelic-journeyman, a world-famous novelist, and a counter-culture hero, leading a life as unlikely, magical, and bizarre as those of his quixotic characters.
Robbins offers intimate snapshots of Appalachia during the Great Depression, the West Coast during the Sixties psychedelic revolution, international roving before homeland security monitored our travels, and New York publishing when it still relied on trees. Written with the big-hearted comedy and mesmerizing linguistic invention for which he is known, Tibetan Peach Pie is an invitation into the private world of a literary legend.
Author Notes
Tom Robbins is a writer, novelist, editor, and journalist. He was born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina on July 22, 1936. Robbins studied journalism at Washington and Lee for two years and later graduated from the Richmond Professional Institute in 1961. He attended the Graduate School of Far Eastern Studies at the University of Washington.
From 1957 to 1960, Robbins served in the U.S. Air Force stationed in Korea as a meteorologist. During his years in the service he took courses in Japanese culture and aesthetics in Tokyo. After the military, Robbins took a job as a copy editor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Robbins later worked as feature editor and art critic at the Seattle Times and part time at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Robbins published the novel, Another Roadside Attraction in 1971. Other books include Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Still Life With Woodpecker. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was made into a 1996 film directed by Gus Van Sant. Robbins has also acted in such films as Made in Heaven and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. A documentary entitled, Tom Robbins: A Writer in the Rain was made in 1997. In 2014, his title Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life, made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Thomas Pynchon wrote that Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues "dazzled his brain," calling it a "piece of working magic" and Robbins "a world-class storyteller." Ever the raconteur, Robbins carries us along a magical wonder tour in this high-flying, Zen koan-like, and cinematic tour of some of the episodes in his journey through space and time. Loosely arranged chronologically, we travel with Tommy Rotten-his mother's pet name for him-from his birth in Statesville, N.C., through his youth in Virginia-including a stint at Hargrave Military Academy-his meteorological training in the military, and his peripatetic pursuit of language and wonder. In San Francisco, three years before he starts his first novel, he "reaffirms his devotion to language, that magical honeycomb of words into which human reality is forever dissolving and from which it continually reemerges, having invented itself anew. a blue dolphin leaping from a sink of dirty dishes." Along the way, Robbins offers flashes of enlightenment into the writing of each of his novels, from Another Roadside Attraction to Villa Incognito. He reveals that "all those pursuits of mine have been part and parcel of the same overriding compulsion: a lifelong quest to perpetually interface with the Great Mystery (which may or may not be God) or, at the very least, to further expose myself to wonder." Master storyteller, indeed, Robbins calls us into his tales and with a wink and a nod, never lets us go until we've heard it all. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Insisting that this tome is neither autobiography nor memoir, countercultural icon Robbins (Another Roadside Attraction) covers the significant touchstones of his life. Beginning with his humble origins in a succession of Tidewater towns (Blowing Rock, Urbanna, Kilmarnock, Warsaw), Robbins knew that he wanted to write since before he could write. Always marked by his funky orientation and anarchic aesthetic, Robbins has held a lifelong love for the offbeat and for the written word. As a child he won a radio in a raffle and sold it for books. Nothing the human race has ever created, he writes, is more cool than a book. Humorous anecdotes and high jinks fill these pages as Robbins waxes poetic about the circus life and shares his love for tomatoes, kimchi, numerous women, and his preference for Pepsi over Coke, but it's not until almost page 200 when his life is forever altered by exposure to LSD and the infinite rabbit holes it has led him to. Now in his eighties (hard to believe), and still a booster for the mind-altering properties of most drugs, Robbins continues to embody Zen coolness and bohemian charm. Famous for his clever turn of a phrase, Robbins, with such nuggets as Adrenaline shot through me like a crystal meth espresso through a break-dance and Shaking his hand was like being forced to grasp the flaccid penis of a hypothermic zombie, certainly won't disappoint. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Robbins will be enjoying a six-city author tour and a national print campaign as part of his publisher's promotional push.--Segedin, Ben Copyright 2014 Booklist
Kirkus Review
The first memoir from the idiosyncratic novelist, who claims that if "it doesn't read like a normal memoir, that may be because I haven't exactly led what most normal people would consider a normal life."Indeed. The narrativecomprised of a series of vignettes from various points in the author's eventful life and appropriately spiked with deliciously mischievous language and philosophical musingsmay be "somewhat subject to the effects of mnemonic erosion," but it is piquant and intriguing nonetheless. In roughly chronological order, Robbins (B Is for Beer, 2009, etc.) covers his childhood in Blowing Rock, N.C.; his move to and residence in Richmond, Va., in which he discovered and thrived in the one enclave in town not considered ultraconservative; his time at Hargrave Military Academy and two years at Washington and Lee; his experiences in the Air Force as a meteorologist in Korea and at Strategic Air Command in Nebraska; his post at the Richmond Times-Dispatch; his move to Seattle and eventual assumption of the position of arts critic at the Seattle Times; and his brush with the FBI, who thought he might have been the Unabomber. As can be expected from Robbins, each short section is subject to digressions and thoughtful pauses, only a few of which linger a bit too long. His chronicle of the writing and publication of Another Roadside Attraction (1971) does not occur until nearly halfway through the book, and the author glides through the rest of his oeuvre (Still Life with Woodpecker, Jitterbug Perfume et al.) with less reflection. Most readers, even die-hard Robbins fans, won't mind, however. They will enjoy this peek into the intelligently goofy and always fertile mind of this inventive writer, who riffs on everything from women and drugs to the publishing industry, conceptions of spirituality and the countless culinary wonders of kimchi.The author's detractors will likely find fault, but this is a fitting cap to a sui generis career, equally satisfying in short installments or read straight through. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The imagination behind Still Life with Woodpecker; Skinny Legs and All; Villa Incognito; and a children's book about beer (B Is for Beer), is now the subject of Robbins's newest collection. Although the author insists that this is not a memoir, he admits that "it waddles and quacks enough like a memoir to be mistaken for one if the light isn't right." At any rate, it is an account of the "absolutely true" events of Robbins's life: his early childhood in rural Appalachia; his stint in Korea, in which he sold toiletries on the black market and unwittingly supplied Communist China with Colgate toothpaste; his many loves and marriages; and his path to writing and to the Pacific Northwest. Spanning more than seven decades, and regions as geographically and culturally diverse as Greenwich Village and Omaha, Robbins's life is a metonymy for the 20th-century American experience: the Depression, war, racism, jazz, the psychedelic Sixties-it's all here. VERDICT Memoir or not, the form suits Robbins's digressive style, philosophical musings, and self-deprecating humor. Each piece stands on its own, but when read side by side they develop into a powerful argument about magic and the necessity of imaginative, interior worlds. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/13.]-Meagan Lacy, Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ. Indianapolis Libs. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| preface | p. xiii |
| 1 born thirsty | p. 1 |
| 2 grub & girls | p. 3 |
| 3 tommy rotten | p. 6 |
| 4 blowing rock mon amour | p. 8 |
| 5 crime, art & death | p. 15 |
| 6 snakes alive | p. 21 |
| 7 step right up | p. 29 |
| 8 yes, virginia | p. 41 |
| 9 fright or lite | p. 52 |
| 10 holy tomato! | p. 60 |
| 11 sticks of wonder | p. 71 |
| 12 flames of fortune | p. 75 |
| 13 now showing: satori | p. 87 |
| 14 washington, lee & wolfe | p. 93 |
| 15 the right snuff | p. 103 |
| 16 cry for funny | p. 109 |
| 17 god bless bohemia | p. 128 |
| 18 fan man | p. 140 |
| 19 love it & leave it | p. 157 |
| 20 roll over, rossini | p. 171 |
| 21 jiminy critic | p. 183 |
| 22 white rabbits | p. 187 |
| 23 acid reflux | p. 196 |
| 24 the redheaded wino | p. 203 |
| 25 romancing the language wheel | p. 207 |
| 26 manhattan tranfer | p. 210 |
| 27 the letter | p. 230 |
| 28 distractions | p. 233 |
| 29 the book | p. 242 |
| 30 birds of a feather | p. 256 |
| 31 the american way | p. 266 |
| 32 "let tom run" | p. 271 |
| 33 hollywood, hollywouldn't | p. 279 |
| 34 woodpecker rising | p. 284 |
| 35 a fool for wonder | p. 295 |
| 36 the good, the bad & the goofy | p. 314 |
| 37 it's a small world | p. 321 |
| 38 russia with love | p. 326 |
| 39 the curse of timbuktu | p. 337 |
| 40 two bunch, too | p. 352 |
| 41 swan song | p. 356 |
| author's note | p. 363 |
