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| Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics) | 
| Author: Wallace Earle Stegner
Publisher: Modern Library
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  111 reviews
Sales Rank: 8963
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 037575931X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780375759314
ASIN: 037575931X
Publication Date: April 9, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Good condition overall. We ship fast!
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Amazon.com Review
It's deceptively simple: two bright young couples meet during the Depression and form an instant and lifelong friendship. "How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?" Larry Morgan, a successful novelist and the narrator of the story, poses that question many years after he and his wife, Sally, have befriended the vibrant, wealthy, and often troubled Sid and Charity Lang. "Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish?" It's not here. What is here is just as fascinating, just as compelling, as touching, and as tragic. Crossing to Safety is about loyalty and survival in its most everyday form--the need to create bonds and the urge to tear them apart. Thirty-four years after their first meeting, when Larry and Sally are called back to the Langs' summer home in Vermont, it's as if for a final showdown. How has this friendship defined them? What is its legacy? Stegner offer answers in those small, perfectly rendered moments that make up lives "as quiet as these"--and as familiar as our own. --Sara Nickerson
Product Description
Called a “magnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdom” by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 106 more reviews...
 Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner November 19, 2008
Our book club of 8 discussed "Crossing" last night. We unanimously felt that it was one of the best books read in a long time. It is literate, erudite, interesting, and has so many levels you could discuss it for weeks. The use of language, and of time itself is astounding.
A Keeper November 1, 2008
I don't have a library but if I did, this is one that'd be there for sure. I LOVE this book. I love Stegner anyway but this one touched something in my heart and made it explode. I cried, couldn't help it, I was just reading along and found these tears dropping on the page. The characters are so vivid and true. This is life in middle class America, this is what happens when you're just trying to live and love and work and be a good person. Stegner writes so beautifully and he is sorely missed. And now as I age and pass through the same ages these characters have gone through, I'm finding similar things happening to me for real. I truly hope that the younger generations discover this book, this style of writer, all this Americana in Stegner and others' writings.
A story that touched me September 25, 2008
I can see how some people would not be excited about this story because it in not overly dramatic. To me it was simple and beautiful. The best stories capture the realness of experience...a story that feels like we can be inside. It is beautifully written and poetic in so many ways. This book is meant to be read slow and chewed on. I read a lot of books but this one is on my "to read again list" because of it's ability to make me look at my own life and question the depth of my relationships.
 No pain, no gain July 1, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
`How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?' asks the author of his own characters, about two thirds through Crossing to Safety; that seems to be the challenge Stegner set himself.
The novel, running from the 1930s to the 70s, revolves around the friendship between two couples, the Langs and the Morgans, in which the men are both literature professors. The Langs are rich and endowed with extended families and the Morgans are self-made and orphans. They all lead full lives in which they remain by-and-large happily married.
Stegner is erudite, and he obviously loves the places he describes, from Madison, Wisconsin to Florence and including the secluded lakeside spot in New England where much of the book is set. But it is difficult to identify with characters whose lives are so uneventful. From the beginning, one of the protagonists is dying, but because the story is told from the perspective of the old Larry Morgan, that only comes out as looking back on a life well spent. The characters barely struggle, and when they do, Stegner chooses to skirt around their conflicts. The reader is left to enjoy his detailed and moody descriptions, his poetic quotes, and the contrasts between the depression and post-war eras: pleasant because the book is well written, but not very exciting.
`You don't,' would be my answer to Stegner's question. Judging from other reviews, obviously, I've come to the wrong conclusion.
Fabulous! February 18, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Beautifully written, provocative, and enduring. Hated for it to end. Wanted to reread it immediately.
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