Carrie by Stephen King: Book Review & Summary
Book: carrie by stephen king.
Carrie is a 1974 horror novel, the first by American author Stephen King. Set in Chamberlain, Maine, the plot revolves around Carrie White, a friendless, bullied high-school girl from an abusive religious household who discovers she has telekinetic powers. Wikipedia
About the Author Stephen King
Excerpts from the original text.
People don’t necessarily get better, but they become smarter. When you become smarter, you will continue to do things like breaking the wings of flies. You just figured out a better reason for doing this kind of thing. —— Quoted from page 78
Book Summary: Carrie by Stephen King
Book review: carrie by stephen king.
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By Stephen King
From its use of intense wording to emotionally relatable characters, ‘Carrie’ is a novel that remains one of the best young adult horror stories made. After publication, ‘Carrie’ had legal issues as its depiction of violence and intense suffering led to it getting banned in some places across the United States.
Article written by Joshua Ehiosun
C2 certified writer.
The story of ‘Carrie’ relates to the lives of many teenagers who struggle daily to fit in among their peers. After she discovered she would never fit in, Carrie gave up and ended up killing everyone she hated; this storyline shows a striking similarity to cases of teenagers who become murderous after discovering they would never fit in.
Though the nudity, violence, and religious extremism depicted in ‘Carrie’ makes it a novel not worthy of a younger audience, the story is well-detailed. ‘Carrie’ gives the reader a sense of relatability as it thrills and excites at different stages. Stephen King also used epistolary writing to ensure the story’s narration happened from a multi-faced point of view.
Another thing that makes ‘Carrie’ an excellent novel is the fluidity of its story. At the beginning of the story, Stephen King intentionally prepares the reader’s mind for the story as he plants intricate details of what happens at the end of the novel; these details set the reader’s mind for the gruesome accident that occurred after Carrie got bathed in pigs’ blood.
In ‘Carrie,’ every character has a specific role in the story . The lack of redundant characters made the novel exceptional. Stephen King employs minor characters as narrators; this creates a realistic world around Carrie’s story by giving the reader an all-rounded experience of who Carrie was. Though Stephen King’s depiction of the main antagonist was a bit edgy as it went slightly overboard, it still maintained the teenage representation of an egotistical bully.
An intriguing part of ‘Carrie’ is that its main character became the antagonist in the lives of everyone. Stephen King opened Carrie’s mind to the readers as he showed how vengeful and hateful her thoughts were. After her last humiliation, Stephen King ensured that Carrie became a perfect villain by removing all sense of good from her. Turning Carrie into a murderous machine made the novel all the more interesting as it delivers a certain level of euphoria to the readers’ minds.
Though the dialogues from ‘Carrie’ were interesting, they got limited to short, profane statements. There was little room for intricate dialoguing in ‘Carrie’ because of the main character’s isolation from her peers. Another thing evident in the dialogues of ‘Carrie’ was how the characters sometimes conversed as adults than teenagers. Because Stephen King could not simulate the mental state of Carrie , he found it difficult to craft dialogues that were teenage-like; this made ‘Carrie’s’ dialogues stunted and sometimes a bit overboard.
Stephen King fixed the dialoguing of ‘Carrie’ by depending on the third-person narrative. He also focused more on adult conversations by using the future versions of the teenagers who experienced the event surrounding Carrie’s rampage.
Writing Style and Conclusion
Epistolary writing made ‘Carrie’ fantastic as it divided the novel’s story into the past and present. Stephen King wrote ‘Carrie’ as the narration of a past event rather than one of the present, and this proved to be exceptionally intelligent as it made the novel stand out. In the story, Stephen King uses the first and third-person perspectives to narrate. The first-person point of view got used for minor characters who told their version of what they saw and experienced during the Carrie incident. The third-person point of view got used for the general story narration.
The ending of ‘Carrie’ is tragically intriguing . The novel creates curiosity in the mind of readers as it ends with a note that shows that Carrie was never the only person to possess telekinetic powers.
Is ‘ Carrie ‘ a good book?
‘Carrie’ is a fantastic novel. The story is exceptional and its characters are relatable. Stephen King’s first published novel, ‘Carrie’ is excellent.
Can a 13-year-old read ‘ Carrie ?’
Because of its extreme violence, underage sex, and depiction of religion, ‘Carrie’ is not suitable for a 13-year-old. After writing the novel, Stephen King got skeptical because of how raw the story of Carrie was.
Is Carrie a bad person?
No, Carrie was a victim of bullying and ostracization. After feeling she could never escape a life of getting tormented no matter how hard she tried, she gave up; this cost her classmates their lives.
Is ‘ Carrie ‘ scary?
Because of how intense the story got, ‘Carrie’ is a bit scary. However, the majority of Carrie’s horror element goes to how she kills almost all her classmates.
Carrie Review: And Then the World Exploded
Book Title: Carrie
Book Description: 'Carrie' revolves around a bullied teen with telekinesis, who, after humiliation, unleashes terror on her town.
Book Author: Stephen King
Book Edition: First Edition
Book Format: Hardcover
Publisher - Organization: Doubleday
Date published: April 5, 1974
ISBN: 978-0-385-27503-3
Number Of Pages: 199
- Writing Style
- Lasting Effect on Reader
‘Carrie’ is a novel that tells the story of a bullied teenage girl, Carrie, with a mentally unstable mother who discovers she has telekinesis. After getting humiliated by her classmates, Carrie used her powers to unleash terror on her entire town.
- Interesting story
- Relatable story
- Interesting characters
- Excellent ending
- Extreme teenage violence
- Underage sex
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Carrie Soto Is Back
Taylor jenkins reid.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published August 30, 2022
About the author
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“we live in a world where exceptional women have to sit around waiting for mediocre men”
”my heart hurts when you hurt because you are my heart.”
”one of the great injustices of this rigged world we live in is that women are considered to be depleting with age and men are somehow deepening."
It sends a tiny thrill through me . . . staring up at a mountain I have yet to scale, each match a step toward the top. It has been so long since I have felt the perfect ache of climbing.
I wondered why anyone would want to build anything out of sand, when tomorrow it will be gone, and you'd have nothing to show for your day.
The bulk of the commentators... They wanted a woman whose eyes would tear up with gratitude, as if she owed them her victory, as if she owed them everything she had.
“We live in a world where exceptional women have to sit around waiting for mediocre men.”
“I am afraid of losing. I am afraid of how it will look to the world. I'm afraid of this match being the last match my father ever sees me play. I am afraid of ending this all on a loss. I am afraid of so much."
"And here's the thing about arena sports—it's not just about how good you are at the game. It's about how good you are at feeling the crowd when they are with you and ignoring the crowd when they aren't. It's about how swept up you can get in the momentum when winning, but also how defiant you can be when the tide turns against you."
“I’m not obsessed with anything. I'm dedicated to winning. And I work hard at that."
“Honor is...sometimes just a nice word for ego.”
“Good is the enemy of great.”
“Can you suffer the indignity of losing to a woman twice in one day?”
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Victor LaValle reviews Stephen King’s latest novel , “The Outsider,” in this week’s issue. In 1974, the Book Review’s Crime columnist, Newgate Callendar, praised King’s first novel , “Carrie.” Read an excerpt below.
Maybe, strictly speaking, it is not a mystery book. But it does have action, suspense and, at the end, a holocaust. And it is exceedingly well-written. So don’t miss “Carrie,” by Stephen King, a first novel and one guaranteed to give you a chill.
“Carrie” is about a telekinetic girl in a small town in Maine. She is an unhappy girl. Her mother is a horror, a religious fanatic eager to beat the goodness of Christ into sinners with a powerful right hand. No wonder Carrie grows up all but mute, unattractive, shy. She is the butt of jokes in school; she is poorly coordinated; she does nor appear to be very bright. But she has strange gifts. Finally, pushed beyond what her emotional state can absorb, she runs psychically amok, unleashing all the latent powers in her. The result is sheer disaster for her and for all around her.
King does more than tell a story. He is a schoolteacher himself and he gets into Carrie’s mind as well as into the minds of her classmates. He also knows a thing or two about symbolism — blood symbolism especially. That this is a first novel is amazing. King writes with the kind of surety normally associated only with veteran writers. This mixture of science fiction, the occult, secondary school sociology, kids good and bad and genetics turns out to be an extraordinary mixture.
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CARRIE SOTO IS BACK
by Taylor Jenkins Reid ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 30, 2022
A compulsively readable look at female ambition.
A retired tennis player returns to the game to defend her Grand Slam record.
Carrie Soto is the best tennis player in the world, and she knows it. Her father, Javier, is a former tennis champion himself, and he's dedicated his life to coaching her. By the time she retires in 1989, she holds the record for winning 20 Grand Slam singles titles. But then, in 1994, Nicki Chan comes along. Nicki is on the verge of breaking Carrie’s record, and Carrie decides she can’t let that happen: She’s coming out of retirement, with her father coaching her, to defend her record…and her reputation. Carrie was never a friendly player, preferring to focus on both a brutal game and brutal honesty, and now the media has a field day with her return to the sport as a 37-year-old. At times, it seems like everyone is waiting for her to fail, but when Carrie wants something, she doesn’t give up easily. Along the way, she reconnects with Bowe Huntley, a 39-year-old tennis player she once had a fling with. Now they need to help each other train, but Carrie quickly realizes she might need him for more than just tennis—if she can let herself be vulnerable for the first time in her life. Reid writes about the game with suspense, transforming a tennis match into a page-turner even for readers who don’t care about sports. Will Carrie win? And, more importantly, will she finally make time for a life outside of winning? Reid has scored another victory and created another memorable heroine with Carrie Soto, a brash, often unlikable character whose complexity makes her leap off the page. Sports commentators may call her “The Battle Axe” or worse, but readers will root for her both on and off the court.
Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-15868-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
LITERARY FICTION
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by Taylor Jenkins Reid
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SEEN & HEARD
by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2024
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”
A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.
Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!
Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780316258876
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION
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by Elin Hilderbrand
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New York Times Bestseller
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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by Kristin Hannah
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Review: Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Carrie Soto is Back is the eighth book by bestselling author Taylor Jenkins Reid and it’s a strong addition to her already impressive backlist.
It’s 1994 and Carrie Soto finds herself watching Nicki Chan in the US open, a tennis player who’s threatening Carrie’s own world record of twenty grand slam wins. After six years in retirement and at the age of 37, Carrie makes the monumental decision to return to tennis for one final season. It’s the showdown of a lifetime, and all eyes are on her.
The highlight of this novel is Carrie Soto herself. Originally mentioned in Jenkins Reid’s previous book, Malibu Rising , Carrie gets to tell her side of the story in this novel. And this is where Jenkins Reid does her best work. Carrie is blunt, focused, and relentless—characteristics that could render her unlikeable but which only serve to make her more relatable, especially as this story is told through her point of view. We see a character who has given everything to her sport, and at great personal cost.
The sheer heart of Carrie is what makes this book so special—whilst she’s a sore loser and seen as ‘ungracious’ towards her rivals, her passion and love for tennis shines throughout the story. This ties in with one of the main themes—that a good female tennis player should be courteous and downplay her hard work. Carrie comes along and completely dismantles this stereotype, and instead shows that yes, she is the best, and no, she’s not afraid to acknowledge it because she’s worked hard to get there. This opens up much-needed further discussion on gender roles within sport, as we see the public grapple with their opinions of Carrie because she doesn’t behave like a ‘typical’ female tennis player.
In true Jenkins Reid style, we also have a different narrative style within this novel. The author utilises different forms of excerpts, like sports and media broadcasts, and dedicates entire chapters to particular tennis matches, alongside standard form chapters. Perhaps most reminiscent of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo , this narrative style fully immerses the reader into the story, and provides a front row seat into the life of Carrie Soto. This also feeds into the pacing of the novel, which never feels like it’s dragging, as the book is constantly working towards its end goal.
In addition to this, there’s also some outstanding relationship work done throughout the story. Jenkins Reid has a knack for writing real, believable relationships, whether they be familial, platonic, or romantic. By capturing a range of different emotions, providing compelling backstory for each character, and giving them room to take up their own space within the story, you get some standout combinations. Take, for example, the dynamic between Carrie and her father, Javier. His role as both Carrie’s coach and father brings out the best—and worst—in Carrie. We learn enough of Javier’s backstory to know his motivations, but then we return to Carrie and experience it through her, too. The duality of relationships like this is another reason why this book works so well.
It’s fair to say that if The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was your top pick by this author, then Carrie Soto is going to give you a similarly jaw-dropping experience. With characters full of heart and bursting to be heard, Carrie Soto is Back is a must-add to your bookshelf.
Carrie Soto is Back is available from Amazon , Book Depository , and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
Will you be picking up Carrie Soto is Back ? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
In this powerful novel about the cost of greatness, a legendary athlete attempts a comeback when the world considers her past her prime—from the New York Times bestselling author of Malibu Rising .
Review: Shipped by Meredith Tate
Carrie Soto is fierce, and her determination to win at any cost has not made her popular. But by the time she retires from tennis, she is the best player the world has ever seen. She has shattered every record and claimed twenty Grand Slam titles. And if you ask Carrie, she is entitled to every one. She sacrificed nearly everything to become the best, with her father, Javier, as her coach. A former champion himself, Javier has trained her since the age of two.
But six years after her retirement, Carrie finds herself sitting in the stands of the 1994 US Open, watching her record be taken from her by a brutal, stunning player named Nicki Chan.
At thirty-seven years old, Carrie makes the monumental decision to come out of retirement and be coached by her father for one last year in an attempt to reclaim her record. Even if the sports media says that they never liked “the Battle-Axe” anyway. Even if her body doesn’t move as fast as it did. And even if it means swallowing her pride to train with a man she once almost opened her heart to: Bowe Huntley. Like her, he has something to prove before he gives up the game forever.
In spite of it all, Carrie Soto is back, for one epic final season. In this riveting and unforgettable novel, Taylor Jenkins Reid tells her most vulnerable, emotional story yet.
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‘Carrie’ (1976) not scary, but nonetheless great
Just as 1974’s “Carrie” was Stephen King’s first book, director Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation was filmgoers’ introduction to King. Unlike with “The Shining” four years later, the author approved of the “Carrie” adaptation. Lawrence D. Cohen faithfully adapts the plot and characters, but we do come away with a slightly different vibe.
Carrie carries us
In the book, we know everyone, because King bounces from brain to brain. In cinema, that’s not possible, so only Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) and Tommy Ross (William Katt) carry us through the action.
Everyone else is indifferent, acting out their proscribed high school clique roles. That’s not a criticism, as I find it to be an accurate take on teens. (What’s less accurate is the casting. Most of the “teens” are in their 20s and 30s. I think the prom crowd includes 40-somethings.)
“Carrie” (1976)
Director: Brian De Palma
Writers: Lawrence D. Cohen (screenplay), Stephen King (novel)
Stars: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving
Even pig-blood prankster Billy (John Travolta) has no beef with Carrie: His two lines about her are “Who’s Carrie White?” and “That Carrie White is kind of cute.” He’s a pathetic idiot (a change from the alpha-male idiot of the book) controlled by his girlfriend, Chris (Nancy Allen). She is one of only two outright antagonists, along with Carrie’s mom Margaret (Piper Laurie).
The opening shower sequence where Carrie gets her first period and the gym class laughs at her makes for a shocking start by 1976 standards. Cinema was less than 20 years removed from the appearance of a toilet on screen being taboo.
“Psycho” challenged that standard, and that film’s DNA is all over “Carrie.” They share iconic horror shower scenes. When Carrie uses her telekinetic power in a quick burst, a Bernard Herrmann-style music sting plays, contrasting with the pleasantly sleepy main score. And the action is set at Bates High School, a change from King’s Ewen High.
Cold high school experience
After the opening, “Carrie” shifts to a lame after-school special feel where everyone is cold. Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) slaps around her students, which paints high school as generally unpleasant – not only from Carrie’s perspective.
When Collins holds a class-wide detention – with prom tickets dependent upon completion – I think “But what’s your punishment?” The teacher openly admits to initially reacting poorly to Carrie’s period, like her students do.
Spacek and Katt magnetically hold our attention. Carrie appears like an outcast only in a movie sense – she doesn’t wear makeup and hangs her hair over her face. When she wears makeup and puts her hair back, she’s pretty – and accepted by the prom-goers, whom Tommy rightly notes are a good bunch.
Still, Spacek is flexible to the film’s needs. Carrie is meek around her mom, yet iconically dangerous when unleashing her powers. We always like her and root for her. Tommy, meanwhile, is sweet and attendant to Carrie throughout the prom.
De Palma doesn’t make it clear if someone laughs at Carrie after she’s doused with pig blood or if she loses her mind with fear that they will laugh. If someone does laugh, it’s probably from a laugh-reaction that many teenagers have to stressful situations.
A stylish switch
Carrie’s makeover marks the film’s makeover from cheap-looking to cinematic. It hints at a dark sense of humor when it parallels a mural of pigs with the Last Supper mural in the Whites’ dining room. Seventies elements like zooms, split screens and practical special effects pepper the last half-hour.
In my head, I remembered Carrie destroying the whole town, but I mixed up “Carrie” with “First Blood.” She actually merely burns down the school. When she kills her mom, it’s in self-defense. She’s not all that far gone at the time of her death via collapsed house, so the tragedy isn’t as thick as in King’s book.
Carrie finds her freedom here more so in the book, where she’s in a perpetual trap between her mom and her classmates. She stands up for herself in the film. If she had gotten away with the prom killings (a case could be made that no survivor knows of Carrie’s ability), she might’ve had a chance at a stable life.
If we had followed Carrie into a sequel, it might’ve been neat to explore her lingering guilt over the prom events. One can imagine an alternate reality where “Carrie” becomes a series like “Friday the 13 th .”
More ‘Psycho’ than slasher
In addition to only consisting of one film up until 1999 (when we meet Carrie’s relative who also has TK powers), “Carrie” is overlooked among Seventies and Eighties slashers because it’s not of a piece with them. It’s closer to “Psycho.”
“Carrie” is generally not scary, nor is it intended to be. Its famous “one last scare” is in fact the only jump scare. This scare finds Sue Snell (Amy Irving) having a nightmare about Carrie – De Palma’s adequate attempt at paralleling King’s dark moment where Sue is privy to Carrie’s experience of dying.
It’s no coincidence that I’ve gone this long without mentioning Sue; she’s even less of a character here than in the novel. In both versions, she’s passive, but in the book she’s an audience stand-in because we’re privy to her mix of sympathy and revulsion toward Carrie.
Outside of the “one last scare,” the film has moody moments, like when Margaret hides behind Carrie’s bedroom door. But no one in “Carrie” is mysterious enough to be scary. We either know the person thoroughly (the Whites, plus Tommy) or they fit a familiar high school role.
Of course, leaving wiggle room where “it’s not really a horror film” is how you get your horror film noticed by Oscar voters (Spacek and Laurie were both rightly nominated). “Carrie’s” scares are as superficially stylized as the prom theme, but that’s beside the point: De Palma delivers an excellent character portrait.
On Fridays, RFMC reviews a Stephen King book, adaptation or related work. Click here to visit our Stephen King Zone.
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Common sense media reviewers.
Tale of telekinetic teen still packs a punch.
A Lot or a Little?
What you will—and won't—find in this book.
Carrie raises questions about high school bullying
Everyone should be treated with kindness and compa
The characters in Carrie all tend to be flawed or
Carrie include scenes of strong violence, especial
Sue Snell has a sexual relationship with her boyfr
The language can be rough. "F--k," "
Two teens visit a bar. The Chamberlain "town
Parents need to know that Stephen King's Carrie is a classic novel of the supernatural, about a troubled teen with telekinetic powers who takes revenge on those who've bullied her. Carrie White is humiliated when she gets her first period in a high school shower, and the other girls throw tampons at…
Educational Value
Carrie raises questions about high school bullying and why some people are turned into scapegoats.
Positive Messages
Everyone should be treated with kindness and compassion.
Positive Role Models
The characters in Carrie all tend to be flawed or troubled in some way. Although Carrie is sympathetic in the way she handles abuse from her crazed mother and the world at large, she responds to her ultimate humiliation with a murderous rage. Sue Snell tries to assuage the guilt she feels about having teased Carrie by having her boyfriend escort Carrie to the prom, but the results are disastrous.
Violence & Scariness
Carrie include scenes of strong violence, especially at its climax. Carrie's mother abuses her and locks her in a dark closet. A student is killed by a falling bucket. Carrie uses her psychic powers and causes deaths by fire, electrocution, car crash, and heart attack.
Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.
Sex, Romance & Nudity
Sue Snell has a sexual relationship with her boyfriend that's mostly gentle and respectful. Christine Hargensen and her boyfriend have sex in a scene that turns sadistic and a little twisted. Carrie's mother sees sex as an abomination and calls her daughter's breasts "dirty pillows."
Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.
The language can be rough. "F--k," "s--t," "c--t," "c--ksucker" each used a few times, as are "damn," "hell," "a--hole," and "bitch."
Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.
Drinking, Drugs & Smoking
Two teens visit a bar. The Chamberlain "town drunk" witnesses the devastation at the book's climax.
Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.
Parents Need to Know
Parents need to know that Stephen King 's Carrie is a classic novel of the supernatural, about a troubled teen with telekinetic powers who takes revenge on those who've bullied her. Carrie White is humiliated when she gets her first period in a high school shower, and the other girls throw tampons at her. Carrie's mother is a religious fanatic who spouts scripture while locking Carrie away in a closet. The language in the book can be rough. "F--k," "s--t," "c--t," and "c--ksucker" are used a few times each, as are "damn," "hell," and "bitch." The climax of the novel is especially violent, with scenes of high school kids being burned to death and electrocuted. Two sex scenes are notable: a gentle one between a longtime couple and a more violent one that turns sadistic. Chamberlain's "town drunk" witnesses the devastation at the novel's climax. Readers may want to check out the original 1976 film adaptation or the 2013 remake .
Where to Read
Community reviews.
- Parents say (5)
- Kids say (24)
Based on 5 parent reviews
Just Like the movie
A lot of surprises even if you already know the premise., what's the story.
Everyone in the small Maine town of Chamberlain thinks Carrie White is odd, perhaps even worthy of their contempt. Her mother is a scary and abusive religious fanatic, and the teen has no friends. But Carrie is able to move objects with her mind, and after she's humiliated during gym class, her psychic powers ratchet up a notch or two. When she's invited to the prom by the most popular boy in school, she thinks it might be another joke on her. She and the residents of Chamberlain, however, have no idea what's in store for them on that fateful night.
Is It Any Good?
A modern classic of the supernatural, this slim, straight-ahead thriller has served as a template for countless inferior imitations. It's still the real deal, though: sharply observed, solidly constructed, and suspenseful despite the narrative's sense of inevitability.
Author Stephen King employs (fictional) newspaper reports, court transcripts, and personal memoirs to lend a sense of realism to the outlandish proceedings, and that strategy, in addition to the author's ability to create credible, sympathetic characters, works splendidly.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about what it feels like to be a social outsider. Why are kids sometimes mean to others who are different from them? What is the meaning of the term "scapegoat"?
Why do you think Carrie is considered a horror classic? What other supernatural stories have you read and liked?
What can be done to prevent bullying ? How should schools intervene when someone complains that he or she is being bullied?
Book Details
- Author : Stephen King
- Genre : Horror
- Topics : Magic and Fantasy , High School
- Book type : Fiction
- Publisher : Anchor Books
- Publication date : July 26, 1974
- Publisher's recommended age(s) : 14 - 18
- Number of pages : 304
- Available on : Paperback, Nook, iBooks, Kindle
- Last updated : July 12, 2017
Did we miss something on diversity?
Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.
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Our editors recommend.
The Bone Season
Beautiful Creatures: Book 1
Horror Books for Kids and Teens
Best horror movies, related topics.
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Carrie Review
Will you go to prom with me.
There’s nothing wrong with Carrie, per se, but it also never really comes alive. It feels somewhat dispassionate, despite having such a strong core story from King, which mixes a real life problem with a horror movie scenario. It just feels too reverential to what’s come before and thus Peirce never puts her own stamp on the material. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @EricIGN , IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman .
In This Article
More Reviews by Eric Goldman
Ign recommends.
‘Private Equity’ asks if working for a hedge fund has to cost your soul
Carrie Sun offers an inside look at being the right hand for a demanding billionaire
For as long as there has been wealth, there have been those who can’t help but flicker their envious gazes upward at those who possess it. And as the past decade of mass media and popular culture suggests, the appetite for stories about the lives of the 1 percent has never been more voracious. Hit shows like “Billions,” “Succession,” “The White Lotus,” “Gossip Girl” (the original and the less-successful reboot) and “The Crown” have enticed viewers with depictions of not just wealth’s luxurious trappings — the extravagant mansions and diamond jewelry — but its underbelly, what it costs those heiresses and plutocrats and corporate (or literal) princes to live the rarefied lives that they do.
A tension has emerged, however, in how audiences and critics receive these works. Do such depictions ultimately glorify or condemn the obscene levels of wealth and privilege enjoyed by those in the highest stratum of society? There are some — the more pedagogic among us, one might say — who would demand that a more explicit message be delivered through the layers of satire, absurdity and complexity: that billionaires are bad and should not be objects of either idolatry or aspiration.
Enter the view from below. You’d be hard-pressed to find many of the super rich willing to give the world an unfiltered account of what it’s like to be them, but the common people whose livelihoods revolve around those stars — the help, the henchmen, the hangers-on — may have no such qualms (barring any nondisclosure agreements). Through their eyes, we are granted a front-row seat to the glittering drama, grounded in the perspective of someone whose moral selling point is that they’re just like you or me.
“ Private Equity ,” a memoir by Fidelity-analyst-turned-MFA-graduate Carrie Sun, documents her years as a personal assistant to Boone Prescott, the founder of a hedge fund named Carbon. (Sun has given pseudonyms to both the fund and its founder.) Carbon is not just any hedge fund; it was described to Sun as “a rock star of a fund” and “the world’s hottest hedge fund,” and Boone as a “once-in-a-generation investor.” He is also — according to the headhunter who recruited Sun for the job — supposed to be “the nicest ,” which is evidently odd enough for a billionaire, let alone a hedge fund guy, to be worth highlighting.
Money, like Sun herself in her role as Boone’s right hand, greases the wheels of all that makes Carbon — and by extension, the world — run. It’s what allows the company to maximize its returns, leveraging existing capital for access to information that helps to create more profits, in an accelerating feedback loop of success. It’s what enabled Sun to make every element of her boss’s life seamless, from lavish vacations to private jets to opulent office parties. It’s what Boone showered Sun with, in the form of compensation — her salary, bonus and the ultimate reward, investment in the fund itself — and perks: spa days, designer goods, shopping sprees, all-expenses-paid trips, private fitness classes. “Remember,” he told her early on, “money can solve nearly everything.”
With this one statement, Boone told Sun all she needed to know about him. She didn’t realize this initially, or at least she professed not to. After her first day of work, she was ready to declare herself “a believer again” in “the possibility of good billionaires.” The naiveté is striking, almost to the point of incredulity. It takes some mental gymnastics to buy that Sun, an otherwise smart and competent individual, could be so guileless that she earnestly believed at one point that working at Fidelity would allow her to find fulfillment “after helping the rest of America achieve their financial dreams,” and that working at Carbon would mean “serving humanity.”
And yet, why else would she stay in a job that would become hellish, demanding not just her time, attention and labor but her physical and emotional well-being? That’s the underlying question that animates the majority of the book, as the stresses of Sun’s role result in an injury, disordered eating, and the abandonment of any pursuit of writing or other personal joys. She deftly weaves together multiple threads — a childhood of love and abuse, the complications that come with being the child of Chinese immigrants, surviving and sublimating a trauma in college — that suggest a psychology of sorts, a blurry portrait of the kind of person who could willingly damage herself for such a job. But the individual paint strokes, although exquisitely and vividly rendered, never quite come together to form a convincing whole; there is something about the artist that remains elusive, as if, even in her own memoir, she’s reclaiming a modicum of the private peace she forfeited during her stint at Carbon.
Sun is much more forthcoming about why she finally decided to call it quits. “I used to think that Boone was driven by a love of the game” and “that making money was a side effect,” she writes about one moment of realization. “No. There was only money. Everything else was a side effect.” From there, the epiphanies come fast and furious, each more ham-fisted than the next in its grasping of class consciousness:
For billionaires, the distraction of others was the point. … Every delay — every stalemate, TBD, or indecision about billionaires’ lives, their management styles, their tax avoidances or excessive influence — was a win for them. They were the ones with the luxury of time to wait out storms in palatial shelters, while the rest of us, with no areas of refuge, watched the weather to stay alive.
As the world burns, as life gets more difficult for everyone outside the 1 percent, I worry that those in precarious situations (often women, people of color, and other marginalized and disadvantaged groups and, especially, their children) will develop an increased sense of alienation … an alienation that is then exacerbated and exploited, as Karl Marx predicted, by the system that is capitalism.
While I can appreciate a good Marx shout-out, there is a clumsiness to Sun’s invocation, as if, in the final scene of “Succession,” Cousin Greg had turned directly to the camera and urged the workers of the world to seize the means of production. As a political message, it may have its merits, but it falls flat as a conclusion to an otherwise absorbing memoir with enough damning details to stand on their own. Some lessons about the world don’t need to be taught so much as felt.
Jenny G. Zhang, a Book World contributing writer, is a senior culture editor at Slate.
Private Equity
By Carrie Sun
Penguin Press. 339 pp. $29
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
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Book Review: Carrie by Stephen King
Sharon Niedringhaus , Writer February 2, 2018
Carrie’s classmates aren’t the only people who torment Carrie: her own mother is one of Carrie’s largest causes of pain. Carrie’s mother is obsessively Christian to the point that she isolated herself from society and tells the people that she does come in contact with that they are going to go to Hell. She abuses Carrie by locking her in a closet to repent her sins, telling her what she is allowed to wear, and not allowing her to leave the house for anything other than school.
I am not a huge fan of horror but I had a hard time putting this book down. Stephen King is great at creating suspense, which is demonstrated in this book by sprinkling newspaper articles and interviews throughout the story. These interruptions reveal parts of Carrie’s past and reference some disaster that you know is going to happen, but don’t know exactly what it will be. I found this book to be more of a thriller than true horror, so if you aren’t a fan of horror but want to read a book by Stephen King to see what it’s like, I would highly recommend this book.
https://www.stephenking.com/library/novel/carrie_images.html
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My review of Carrie, the novel
- Thread starter Speedygi81
- Start date Jan 20, 2014
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- Jan 20, 2014
There are few writers that can capture the imagination of their readers as well as Stephen King. Carrie is, as told by Stephen, a rough and raw novel written by a younger writer whose craft is taking form. But if books are judged by the level of visceral tenacity and wild idea-slinging, Carrie ranks highly in the halls of fiction. The yarn, if one considers a pulp-like horror story as such, lies between deep western boogie myth and an admittedly unpolished slant on the effects of ridicule on the female psyche. It will win very little approval from literature critic circles but it possesses more of the deeper truths than most books would ever have. That speaks of pure boldness, almost as if Stephen King has a bead on the topic like someone having a feud. His heart and mind knows paranoia and yet he feels at home, or even in the right place, when darkness is involved. We feel for the awkwardness of Carrie, and in a high school setting where that almost always equates to social outcasting, creating a tense, invoking scenario that unfolds and captures. At first glance, the clunky nature of the ideas does force the reader to perceive them as afterthoughts, not constructed in any sort of coherent logic, but they do provide a glimpse into a writer’s workings. The seeming explanations for Carrie’s awkwardness in school, with the rigid religious beliefs of her parents being a large part, are not as concrete in the way Thriller novels explain, but mostly vague clouds that form a shape of terror. It is a tribute to Clive Barker or Jack Ketchum’s school where terror lies there’s always a source of grief. The grief is in many ways a precursor to the actions of the characters, whether good or bad, and belies the pragmatism of these Stephen King books. The cause and effect of what these characters do are rooted in grief, and sometimes guilt. Some express them in anger-like Carrie herself- and some in repentant resolve, but as in real life, but people never have great vision, or a sense they would get there in the end, spurring a microscopic view of a realist’s ideal that life is unexpected and sometimes cruel. The climax and the ending may have been constructed with more technical aplomb but it really carried on the record that Stephen King already had set in place. The book must end in darkness and despair, but even he had the sensitivity to inject a little hope, or at least a movement of progress to the future, a grim future that our dull reality could well have hidden. A worthy piece of reprieve from terror written by the master of dark stories, has to be remembered even if it lacks literature credibility.
kingricefan
All-being, keeper of space, time & dimension..
Beautiful!
- Jan 23, 2014
- Nov 14, 2016
Hi I'm at the library and I might get cut off. I didn't actually have time to read what you wrote yet but I wanted to share my thoughts about Carrie too. I thought it was so real, I actually do think it really happened. Carrie didn't get told that her period blood was the old baby's bed, because her body makes a new bed each month. The nice chick really lent her boyfriend, but got no respect from all the cruel catty bitches who wished they were that secure, and weren't. The pig blood dripped on her like the best joke ever, and poor Carrie was too surprised to laugh at the way her gorgeous expensive luxurious prom gown was toilet paper. She went home and murdered her mother who was too much for anyone to put up with anyway. Hope I'm remembering those events in order. Did the mom go before the prom...? I remember the movie and the knives pinning the mom to the doorway the way she deserved. I'll never forget my world religions highschool professor talking about how real life poltergeists are supposed to be upset teenagers. Zappo! Make that air move, world, and watch out! POLTER POWER ACCESS REALITY I just typed that to scare you! Heh. One minute to go. Tell me all. *love* TIKI
rockerchick
Bella donna.
- Aug 14, 2017
This is one of my favorite King books. I could empathize with the protagonist because I was a misfit in middle school and high school. My family was also quite religious.
Active Member
- Sep 21, 2017
I haven't read the book yet, but the movie was pretty good. Hopefully the book is just as good.
jake erb said: I haven't read the book yet, but the movie was pretty good. Hopefully the book is just as good. Click to expand...
- Aug 2, 2018
The book is definitely better than the movie - nothing can be compared with King's manner of writing. But Brian De Palma did his best while shooting that film, no doubt.
The idiot is IN
SpikyT said: The book is definitely better than the movie - nothing can be compared with King's manner of writing. But Brian De Palma did his best while shooting that film, no doubt. Click to expand...
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Book Review: Glamour and tragedy intertwine in Griffin Dunne’s memoir ‘The Friday Afternoon Club’
This cover image released by Penguin shows “The Friday Afternoon Club” by Griffin Dunne. (Penguin via AP)
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Actor and producer Griffin Dunne grew up in New York and Los Angeles with the glitterati all around. His father, Dominick Dunne, a television executive and film producer when Dunne was young, liked to hobnob with the rich and famous. His uncle, journalist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, married writer Joan Didion and they became an L.A. power couple.
Growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s, he attended seemingly endless parties with Sean Connery, Warren Beatty and many others, even Judy Garland. Celebrity hobnobbing continued when Dunne moved to New York to try to make it as an actor. For his 27th birthday, Susan Sarandon brought him premium LSD from Timothy Leary. He roomed with his best friend Carrie Fisher until she hit it big with “Star Wars.”
But tragedy was always brewing close under the surface of Dunne’s seemingly idyllic life. Even as he began to make a name for himself as a producer and then an actor in movies like “An American Werewolf in London” and Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” his mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, his brother battled mental illness and his father decamped to rural Oregon to fight his substance abuse issues.
But the biggest tragedy came in 1982 when his sister, Dominique Dunne, herself an up-and-coming actress with a role in “Poltergeist,” was murdered on her front lawn by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Dunne’s family attended the trial every day, which ended in a light sentence for Dunne’s killer. Griffin’s father later chronicled the trial for Vanity Fair, kicking off his second career as a writer and novelist.
With a breezy style, Dunne chronicles how his family got through good times and bad — despite interfamilial spats — by coming together as a family when it counted.
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Review: The World Still Needs Habermas
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The World Still Needs Habermas
The german philosopher is starting to outlive his liberal legacy..
It is hard to convey to people outside Germany the extraordinary role Jürgen Habermas has played in the country. To be sure, his name inevitably appears on the more or less silly lists of world’s most influential philosophers. But there are no other instances of a public intellectual having been important in every major debate—in fact, often having started such debates—over six decades.
Der Philosoph: Habermas und wir , Philipp Felsch, Propyläen Verlag, 256 pp., €24, February 2024
A new book by Berlin-based cultural historian Philipp Felsch, translated from German simply as The Philosopher with the clever subtitle Habermas and Us , argues that Habermas has always been perfectly in sync with different eras of postwar German political culture. This is a remarkable achievement for someone of his longevity: Habermas turns 95 this year. As Felsch observes, had Michel Foucault lived that long, he could have commented on Donald Trump’s presidency; had Hannah Arendt reached that age, she could have extended her reflections on terrorism to 9/11.
It also makes a confession on the philosopher’s part at the end of the book all the more remarkable: Felsch reports that, after adverse reactions to his articles on the Russia-Ukraine war, Habermas feels, for the very first time, as if he no longer understands German public opinion. Has Habermas changed, or is the country changing, turning away from the pacificism and “post-nationalism” the philosopher has championed for decades?
Habermas has long been a polarizing figure. For many in the English-speaking world, this is somewhat baffling, for they think they know him as the philosopher of successful communication and even consensus; they probably also think of him as the author of lengthy, hard-to-comprehend theoretical works.
Ironically, it’s Habermas’s gift as a writer that often makes it difficult to translate his ideas. Habermas was a freelance journalist before he became an academic, and his public interventions—always in writing, never on TV or radio—are stylistically brilliant polemics rich in metaphors. The academic volumes can be hard to translate precisely because suggestive metaphors also do philosophical work.
Among them is a book originally published in 1962 that, to this day, has sold the most copies of all of Habermas’s works. It has an unwieldy title— The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere —but its main thesis appears straightforward: Democracy is not just about free and fair elections; it also crucially requires open processes of forming public opinion. In Habermas’s stylized account, the 18th century had seen an increasing number of bourgeois readers come together freely to discuss novels in salons and coffeehouses. Eventually, discussions turned to political questions. Whereas monarchs had presented themselves before the people, citizens (at least male and propertied ones) now started to expect states to represent their views and act for them.
It is often forgotten that Habermas’s book tells a story of decline and fall: Capitalism, with its increasing reliance on manipulative advertising techniques, and the rise of a complex administrative state had destroyed a free and open public sphere. Yet, in retrospect, the 1960s would appear to be a golden age of mass media, a point Habermas conceded in a 2022 essay on “the novel transformation of the public sphere.” There, he contrasted our era of supposed “filter bubbles” and “post-truth” with a world characterized by widely respected and economically successful newspapers as well as TV news, around which entire nations could congregate each evening.
As Felsch notes, the book as well as Habermas’s subsequent more philosophical work on communication contained just the right kind of message for a postwar age when West Germans, emerging from the Nazi dictatorship and older traditions of obedience to state authority, began learning how to discuss freely. Like many on the left, Habermas experienced the atmosphere of the early Federal Republic as stultifying: Konrad Adenauer, the rabidly anti-communist chancellor, promised “no experiments,” tacitly incorporated former Nazis into the new state, and had little tolerance for a critical press—let alone critical intellectuals.
Today, the country is characterized by an unusually large number of talk shows on evening TV that receive extensive newspaper commentary the next morning, by public discussion forums that are often subsidized by the state, and by newspapers devoting many columns to weekslong debates among professors. Habermas, contrary to the cliché of a rationalist philosopher of deliberation who would ideally like to make parliaments into seminar rooms, has explicitly called for a public sphere that is “wild” and in which all kinds of views can be voiced. At the same time, such forums are meant to function like “sewage treatment plants,” filtering out false information as well as plainly anti-democratic views.
Habermas’s endorsement of liberal democratic procedures—often derided by Marxists as merely “formal democracy”—made him hostile to postwar intellectual trends in France, which he suspected of promoting irrationalism and an aestheticized politics that lacked all normative standards. Felsch recounts Habermas and Foucault dining together in Paris in an “icy atmosphere” in the early 1980s. Apparently, the only real common topic of conversation was German films: Habermas, Felsch tells us, professed his preference for Alexander Kluge’s movies dealing with the German past in a reliably pedagogical manner, while Foucault liked Werner Herzog’s celebration of “ecstatic truth” in his explorations of Africa and Latin America, with the evidently irrational Klaus Kinski in the lead.
Jürgen Habermas in the auditorium of the philosophical faculty of Frankfurt University in 1969. Max Scheler/Süddeutsche Zeitung
It is not an accident that Habermas has always been careful not to cultivate anything like a traditional German Geniekult , or cult of the towering genius—nor that he sometimes serves as Exhibit A for French observers who claim that, compared with Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, contemporary German philosophy has become thoroughly boring, dominated by what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze called “bureaucrats of pure reason.”
But Felsch, who interviewed the philosopher twice in his modernist bungalow in Bavaria, gets Habermas to reveal something surprising: Every single one of his newspaper articles, Habermas claims, was written out of anger. Indeed, rather than being a bureaucrat of pure reason pedantically administering legacies of the Enlightenment, Habermas is best understood as a thoroughly political animal—even as a somewhat impulsive man, but with reliable left-liberal political instincts. Beyond a general commitment to dialogue and cooperation, his political vision entails an evolution beyond inherited ideas of ethnic nationalism and toward a cosmopolitan international legal order, each aspect of which is now increasingly under threat.
In the early 1980s, his political impulses led him to a subject he had previously doubted was “capable of theory”: history. In 1986, in a polemical piece that provoked one of the most important debates in postwar Germany, he accused four historians of trying to “normalize” the German past—as well as the German present. It was crucial, he wrote, to resist any relativization of the Holocaust by conservatives who supposedly thought the Federal Republic should adopt something like a “normal” nationalism. Instead, he suggested, Germans might have learned something special from their uniquely problematic past by adopting what Habermas termed “constitutional patriotism.” Rather than being proud of cultural traditions and heroic deeds by great national heroes, Germans had learned to take a critical stance vis-à-vis history, from the vantage point of universal principles enshrined in a liberal democratic constitution.
This patriotism was often dismissed by conservatives as fit merely for seminar rooms: too abstract and, with a particularly inappropriate metaphor, too “bloodless.” Yet there is little doubt that Habermas emerged as the victor in what came to be known as the Historikerstreit , or historians’ dispute, and that his suggestion of a “post-national political culture” was in fact, if not in name, adopted by ever more German politicians. In the end, Habermas and Adenauer had converged on the same goal: a Germany firmly anchored in the West, except that Habermas began to see it as a possible avant-garde in the move toward a more cosmopolitan future.
That achievement was put into doubt by the biggest shock to Habermas’s political world before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine: the entirely unexpected unification of East and West Germany, overseen by Helmut Kohl, a trained historian who, according to Habermas, had been central to attempts at “normalizing” the past. Habermas had been skeptical of unification as long ago as the 1950s, when Social Democrats pushed for overcoming the Cold War division. In 1989, the push for re-creating the German nation-state appeared likely to replace the hard-won achievement of constitutional patriotism with ethnic nationalism.
Germany’s Far-Right Surge Isn’t New
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Progressive thinkers tried to explain ever more of the world—and found themselves explaining nothing at all.
When the Berlin Wall fell, Habermas confessed that he simply felt no “relationship” with the East. According to what many saw as a patronizing stance, he claimed the revolutions in Central Europe had not created any novel political ideas but were simply about “catching up” with the West. He was also concerned that Central European nation-states, with their heightened sensitivity about newly regained sovereignty, might weaken the imperative to deepen a cosmopolitan order.
Subsequently, Habermas became a fervent supporter of European integration. In the late 1970s, he was still saying he was “not a fan of Europe,” since what was then called the European Economic Community had been initiated by Christian Democrats such as Adenauer and operated mostly as a common market. But the European Union became a kind of political life insurance policy for those anxious about any post-Cold War resurgence of German nationalism. To the extent that Europe would become a polity, it seemed reasonable to think that the community, with its variety of national cultures, would have to be one held together by abstract political principles—a European constitutional patriotism of sorts. In the early 2000s, Habermas, together with then-Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of the German Greens, campaigned for a European constitution—an effort that turned out to be a failure.
Habermas also came to think that Europe’s identity could be defined by its commitment to international law—and as a counterweight in that way to a United States that, after 9/11, appeared to lose its normative bearings. In 2003, he co-wrote a passionate appeal for European unity with Jacques Derrida, an erstwhile philosophical adversary whom Habermas suspected of irrationalism and conservative tendencies, like so many French theorists. Europe was to define itself as law-abiding and humane, on account of its welfare states—in opposition to George W. Bush’s America breaking through the shackles of international law. The hubris of U.S. neoconservatives proved a personal disappointment for an intellectual who had formative stints in the United States ever since first being welcomed to New York by Arendt.
Another central part of Habermas’s proposed European identity was a commitment to pacifism. Felsch argues convincingly that Habermas has remained remarkably consistent in his pacifist instincts: as an opponent of rearming the Bundeswehr in the 1950s, as a critic of the Vietnam War in the ’60s, and as an advocate for those blockading sites where nuclear-capable missiles had been stationed in the early 1980s. (Habermas had been the first prominent theorist to justify civil disobedience in a country where law-breaking in the name of moral principles seemed deeply suspect.)
Habermas at his home in Starnberg, Germany, in August 1981. Roland Witschel/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
At the same time, Felsch reminds us that Habermas justified all of Germany’s crucial foreign-policy decisions of the post-unification period: its support for the Gulf War, its participation in the intervention in Kosovo, the refusal of the Social Democratic-Green government to join the United States’ “coalition of the willing” in 2002. For Habermas, a war was justifiable as long as it foreshadowed a cosmopolitan legal order, which left plenty of room for interpretation. (That seemed at least a somewhat plausible account for military action authorized by the United Nations; it was a much harder case to make for NATO’s bombing of Belgrade in 1999.)
But the room for interpretation in Habermas’s framework seems not to be able to accommodate the ways that war in Ukraine is now changing political culture in Germany and Europe. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Habermas wrote in the center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung in support of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s cautious approach to supplying military aid. Habermas had always been close to Scholz’s Social Democratic Party; its leaders sought his advice, though he would on occasion also pressure them to rethink what he regarded as mistaken policies, such as the diktat of austerity during the European debt crisis. And there had long been a connection between certain factions of the party and the philosopher in their shared affinity for anti-militarism.
Yet Habermas’s call for negotiations with Moscow in 2023 was widely attacked, including by some on the left. Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrii Melnyk tweeted that his interventions constituted a “disgrace for German philosophy.” Germany, like much of Europe, had arrived at a new political imperative prompted by Zeitenwende —Scholz’s phrase for the major turning point in history marked by a recommitment to military self-defense. For Habermas, who has always argued that politics should err on the side of seeking peace and mutual understanding, this turn has been impossible to support. By the book’s end, Habermas confesses to Felsch that he no longer understands the reactions of the German public.
Critics of Habermas often claim that he has given up his long-standing commitment to a radical democratic and socialist agenda. He supposedly was acting merely as an EU cheerleader; he had let go of any Marxist legacy, had given up on democratizing the economy, and, maybe most damning, was becoming what Germans call staatstragend : a pillar of the political establishment. When he received one of the country’s most prestigious cultural prizes in 2001, much of the federal cabinet was in attendance.
But Felsch suggests that if Habermas’s legacy is indeed slipping away, it has less to do with the way Habermas has changed than the way the world around him has. Habermas’s fears of a more nationalist Germany appear confirmed with a rising far right that flaunts its historical revisionism in ways unimaginable after the Historikerstreit. The EU is hardly a paragon of post-nationalism, its aspirations to be a global “normative power” in shambles—it cannot even get its act together in stopping far-right leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban from undermining liberal democracy. The hopes for a cosmopolitan legal order have been dashed in a new age of great-power rivalries. To be sure, Habermas had never committed to anything remotely resembling an end-of-history thesis, but his basic impulse that a world of freundliches Zusammenleben —friendly coexistence—was a realistic utopia has certainly been called into question.
Yet it would be wrong to conclude that Habermas’s thought only made sense in the “safe space” of bygone West Germany. The case for something like constitutional patriotism is, if anything, more urgent in the face of a resurgent hard right. The EU is failing in all sorts of ways, but its structures remain available for politically and morally more ambitious undertakings. (Evidently, Habermas has failed to persuade German leaders to take up French President Emmanuel Macron’s invitation to build a sovereign Europe.) As disillusioned as Habermas is with the United States—long the tacit guarantor of his worldview, one is tempted to say—the best of its universalist founding ideals have hardly been invalidated.
Habermas was never like certain naive liberals of the ’90s: History does not simply prove ideas right or wrong; rather, history is an ongoing fight in the wilderness of the public sphere. The task for intellectuals is not to be either optimistic or pessimistic, which was the way for old-style anti-modern thinkers in Germany to prove depth. Instead, it is to be and to stay irritable.
Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. His most recent book is Democracy Rules .
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‘Don’t cut down that scene’: ‘I Am: Celine Dion’ director on capturing singer’s seizure
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“This is by far the biggest crowd I’ve had in a few years,” said Celine Dion onstage at Lincoln Center last week. She was making a rare appearance to introduce “I Am: Celine Dion ,” a documentary chronicling her struggles with stiff-person syndrome , a rare neurological disorder that causes muscle rigidity and has made it difficult for her to do the thing that has most defined her since childhood: sing.
“I cannot believe how fortunate I am to have my fans in my life,” Dion said, pausing to hold back tears as her son, René-Charles Angélil, who was waiting on the side of the stage, handed her a tissue. “Thank you to all of you from the bottom of my heart for being a part of my journey. This movie is my love letter to each of you. I hope to see you all again very soon.”
Director Irene Taylor was not exactly a Dion aficionado when she got a call a few years ago asking if she’d be open to making a film about the French Canadian singer who is known for her powerhouse vocals.
“Honestly, I thought it was not going to be a good fit. I don’t say that out of arrogance. I was like, “What would they want from me? This is not the kind of movie I make,” said Taylor in a video chat. Her previous documentaries include the deeply personal “ Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements ,” about her deaf son and father. She was eventually won over by Dion and tried to approach her subject “with no peripheral vision,” Taylor said. “I really just tried to look at the person in front of me and what was happening.”
Celine Dion says singing is ‘like somebody’s strangling you’ due to stiff-person syndrome
Celine Dion says her rare disorder, characterized by muscle rigidity and spasms, hinders her ability to perform or carry out everyday tasks.
June 7, 2024
The documentary, now streaming on Prime Video , uses clips of performances and interviews from Dion’s 40-year career and traces the basics of her biography — beginning with her childhood in Quebec, where she was the youngest of 14 children, and then her crossover journey from French-language teen star to a chart topper with power ballads like “Because You Loved Me” and “ My Heart Will Go On .”
Weaving archival material with contemporary footage of Dion opening up about her health struggles, “I Am: Celine Dion” shows the singer at her most vulnerable, both emotionally and physically.
Gone are the glitz and glamour associated with her onstage persona; Dion appears mostly makeup-free in casual dress, making goofy videos with her adolescent twins. She comes off as endearingly kooky — at one point she breaks out into the Kit Kat “Gimme a break” jingle — but also self-aware and very funny, like when she delivers an impromptu monologue about her love of shoes.
She is also candid about the extent of her health issues, revealing in the film that she had, by then, been experiencing symptoms for 17 years. What first manifested through occasional vocal strain grew steadily more debilitating, forcing her to find ways to fake it on stage and cancel shows — something that she, a performer with a zealous work ethic and devotion to her fans, found nearly as painful as the physical condition itself.
Perhaps most unforgettably, the film captures Dion as she is stricken with an episode of her illness in the middle of a physical therapy session. While lying on a table, she suddenly freezes. And though she can barely make a sound, her wrenched face conveys the agony she’s experiencing. At the New York screening, audience members could be heard weeping throughout the scene.
Taylor followed Dion for about a year, spending several days with her a month, and found her brave and authentic — qualities that she hopes come through in the film.
“She was down to earth with me,” she said, “so I just wanted to show the woman who showed me herself.”
Taylor spoke with The Times the day after the screening in New York. The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Did you know about her diagnosis when you signed up to make this film?
I did not know about her illness when I signed on to do this. She had been withholding it from the world, including me. It all made sense once I talked with her. I realized it was a pretty devastating lie that she was telling people for years. Her athleticism on stage did not suggest that she was sick. Yes, she was canceling some shows, but she found ways to fake it.
In the beginning, I didn’t know what the film would be about. I didn’t really know what my take would be. I just knew it would be a portrait of her. She had asked me, “Is it possible to make a documentary where no one else is in the documentary, it’s just me?” That would sound very self-centered coming from a certain kind of person, but it was a genuine question. I told her, “It’s certainly possible, but it’s going to be a harder road for you because I need more of your time, and I need your authentic self.”
But Celine was so straight with me. She never told me to stop filming. In fact, she said, “Don’t talk to me about whether you can do something or not, because it’ll throw me off. You’re here in my home, you’ve got carte blanche, do what you need to do.” That is a profound tool to give me. She did not get involved in my editing. She did not ask me to change anything. It is a rare opportunity to be able to make a film about a public figure and have that much agency.
Taylor Swift and Céline Dion make up backstage after awkward Grammy handoff
Céline Dion’s return to the Grammy Awards stage Sunday was a triumphant moment for the ill singer, but some viewers were upset that Taylor Swift didn’t seem to acknowledge it.
Feb. 5, 2024
At what point did you learn about the illness?
I got a call saying, “Could we talk about this?” It was a call with someone from the record company and a couple of people from her management team and they basically said, “She’s not well, and we don’t have a name for it.” There wasn’t consensus about it. I had that information going into the first day of shooting, and then it was like a fire hose at me. “Seventeen years, I’ve been lying to everybody. I am feeling so guilty.” I was so overwhelmed that first day. I think she had been holding it in for a long time. Over the first half of filming, I was watching her flail, not knowing what she had, and the doctors not knowing what to do about it. Then over time, there was consensus, and she was very relieved when she got the diagnosis, even though it’s an orphan disease. She said to me, “I don’t want to have a rare disease. No one knows how to fix it.”
When she got that formal diagnosis, that is when she wanted to tell the world, and the way she wanted to do that was through Instagram — just tell people directly. So I pivoted in my filmmaking and decided how to incorporate her telling the world into the story.
With celebrities and public figures, it can be hard to get them off of their narrative. How did you find her as an interview subject?
I had reservations about making the film, because I saw “Celine Dion” in quotes, as a very cultivated public figure. She had a persona, and I was a little cynical about that. I didn’t want to make a film about someone who had an agenda. It took getting to talk with her, and then just connecting with each other on a personal level about certain personal things. We both love trees. We both raise boys. She was very interested in picking apart everything that was in [the background on] our Zoom calls: “What’s that?” You could tell she was just trying to piece me together.
I had made very intimate films about people I know very well, like my parents and my son. I just didn’t know where she’d fit in. In the end, I realized that the fact that Celine was so used to cameras, the fact that she had lived her life under lights, actually made her a very authentic subject. I realized that, instead of [her celebrity] being something to be wary of, it actually was working in my favor, but only because she had decided, “I have nowhere else to go.” She seemed to have it all. In fact, she was living a very private lie, and she called it a lie. I was amazed at the language she was willing to use to describe herself.
We see Dion have this very intense episode, where it’s clear she’s in excruciating pain. Tell me about filming that — what was going through your head?
This all happened all in a matter of a minute. We were in a physical therapy session. We were 10 minutes out of two days of [her] recording [music] for the first time in several years. She left feeling elated, because she didn’t think she’d be able to do it. Ironically, it is that elation, that emotional high, that can trigger this kind of response. We could have turned the camera off, but we had been filming for eight months at that point, and Celine said, “Film everything.” I thought to myself, “I gotta make sure this woman’s breathing,” so I just pushed my headphones into my ear, and I listened, and I could not hear her breathing. I asked, “Is she breathing?” She was able to squeeze [the therapist’s] hand. I looked at my [director of photography], and we just kept going.
I was actually grateful that about forty minutes into the episode, you hear her therapist mention that the cameras are in the room, and he checks with her if it’s OK. I wasn’t sure what she would say in that moment, but she said it was OK. I couldn’t believe what had happened, and I was so grateful she was OK, but I realized that it might be an opportunity, if Celine was up for it, to really show and really validate her suffering.
Six months later, I showed her a rough cut of the film. I was very nervous. I knew there was no way I would ever do this without her consent. She said, “I think this film will help me.” Then she said, “Don’t cut down that scene.”
How did this project change your perception of her? Are you a fan now, or at least an admirer?
A filmmaker should be very wary of getting intoxicated by anything. But I really did allow myself to be inspired by her. We’re almost the same age. I have my health, and I watched someone who was really struggling. She finds so much joy in making music that she is going to come out with something on the other side of this that is going to be very powerful. It may not be the Celine Dion that hit the money notes and basically does three aerobics classes during a concert. It might be a different intensity, it might be a different artistic approach, it might be a different way of performing. But I can tell you she is very focused on being an advocate for people with this disease.
More to Read
Céline Dion demonstrates how stiff-person syndrome has affected her voice
June 11, 2024
Anna Paquin’s latest premiere glam included a matching cane, amid reported health issues
April 4, 2024
With the success of her first film, ‘Past Lives,’ Celine Song has found her future
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Meredith Blake is an entertainment reporter for the Los Angeles Times based out of New York City, where she primarily covers television. A native of Bethlehem, Pa., she graduated from Georgetown University and holds a master’s degree from New York University.
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IMAGES
COMMENTS
This book is ultimately about guilt, about why and how we ostracize others, and what we do with our power. Sue, as a result, is the person the book is really about. It's about Sue's terrible behavior and subsequent guilt. Sue's feelings of hate and disgust instead of pity for Carrie. And her complicated and sometimes selfish motivations ...
Varun_shiroyasha. ADMIN MOD. I just read Stephen King's "Carrie". I have a Doubt. Carrie's father Ralph White died before she was born. His Father as said in the book died seven months before her birth, but later on in the book it was said that when Margaret White tried to kill Carrie before she was even a year old, Ralph stopped her.
I will be doing this book discussions daily (until caught up then weekly) for anyone interested in tagging along with me in my quest to read all of Stephen King. So I really enjoyed this book and it is one of my favorites. My heart always breaks for Carrie and I think King does a great job at making the reader emotionally invested in her stories.
Set in Chamberlain, Maine, the plot revolves around Carrie White, a friendless, bullied high-school girl from an abusive religious household who discovers she has telekinetic powers. Wikipedia. Originally published: April 5, 1974. Author: Stephen King. Genres: Horror, Horror fiction, Epistolary novel. Pages: 199.
3.99. 734,418 ratings25,767 reviews. A modern classic, Carrie introduced a distinctive new voice in American fiction -- Stephen King. The story of misunderstood high school girl Carrie White, her extraordinary telekinetic powers, and her violent rampage of revenge, remains one of the most barrier-breaking and shocking novels of all time.
The bestselling author of Theology of Home, Carrie Gress shows that fifty years of radical feminism have solidified the primacy of the traditionally male sphere of life and devalued the attributes, virtues, and strengths of women. Feminism, the ideology dedicated to "smashing the patriarchy," has instead made male lives the norm for everyone.
An intriguing part of 'Carrie' is that its main character became the antagonist in the lives of everyone. Stephen King opened Carrie's mind to the readers as he showed how vengeful and hateful her thoughts were. After her last humiliation, Stephen King ensured that Carrie became a perfect villain by removing all sense of good from her.
November 19, 2022. Taylor Jenkins Reid, as usual, managed to write a stunning book that will win the hearts of the readers. She chose to discuss the world of tennis through the life of Carrie Soto in this book. Carrie is a true champion who holds the current world record for the most number of grand slams.
Victor LaValle reviews Stephen King's latest novel, "The Outsider," in this week's issue. In 1974, the Book Review's Crime columnist, Newgate Callendar, praised King's first novel ...
Sports commentators may call her "The Battle Axe" or worse, but readers will root for her both on and off the court. A compulsively readable look at female ambition. 8. Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022. ISBN: 978--593-15868-5. Page Count: 384. Publisher: Ballantine. Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022. Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022.
Rating. 10 / 10. Buy From. Amazon. Book Depository. Carrie Soto is Back is the eighth book by bestselling author Taylor Jenkins Reid and it's a strong addition to her already impressive backlist. It's 1994 and Carrie Soto finds herself watching Nicki Chan in the US open, a tennis player who's threatening Carrie's own world record of ...
View community ranking In the Top 1% of largest communities on Reddit. So I just finished reading Carrie for the first time . I already knew the outcome going in, hard to avoid spoilers for a book that came out fifty years ago that's been adapted to two movies and a miniseries. ... After finishing dark tower 1-7 for the third time earlier ...
Just as 1974's "Carrie" was Stephen King's first book, director Brian De Palma's 1976 adaptation was filmgoers' introduction to King. Unlike with "The Shining" four years later, the author approved of the "Carrie" adaptation. Lawrence D. Cohen faithfully adapts the plot and characters, but we do come away with a slightly different vibe.
Everyone should be treated with kindness and compa. Positive Role Models. The characters in Carrie all tend to be flawed or. Violence & Scariness. Carrie include scenes of strong violence, especial. Sex, Romance & Nudity. Sue Snell has a sexual relationship with her boyfr. Language. The language can be rough.
The new Carrie has too much of a going through the motions feel to it, as we go through this very familiar story, towards its inevitable conclusion. Though the original source material is King's ...
Review by Jenny G. Zhang. February 15, 2024 at 10:00 a.m. EST. (Penguin Press) 6 min. For as long as there has been wealth, there have been those who can't help but flicker their envious gazes ...
Book Review: Carrie by Stephen King. Sharon Niedringhaus, WriterFebruary 2, 2018. Carrie is a horror novel written by Stephen King. It details the events leading up to a huge catastrophe that occurs at a high school prom in Maine. Connecting all of these events is the title character, Carrie, who is bullied by everyone at school, abused by her ...
But if books are judged by the level of visceral tenacity and wild idea-slinging, Carrie ranks highly in the halls of fiction. The yarn, if one considers a pulp-like horror story as such, lies between deep western boogie myth and an admittedly unpolished slant on the effects of ridicule on the female psyche.
The book is amazing and so much better told than any of the movies. The movies don't resemble the book very well. However the 1976 version in my opinion is the only movie that seems to bring some of the book to life. Usually it's better to read Carrie before seeing any of the movies, but personally that's just me. 1.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Israel's military incursions in Gaza, civil wars in Sudan and Myanmar, tens of thousands killed, millions displaced and global military spending standing at $2.4 ...
The Associated Press is an independent global news organization dedicated to factual reporting. Founded in 1846, AP today remains the most trusted source of fast, accurate, unbiased news in all formats and the essential provider of the technology and services vital to the news business.
Margaret kills Carrie because she sees Carrie as her sin, compounded by not killing her earlier when what she sees as Carrie's evil first shows itself. Margaret kills Carrie to save her from what she sees as Carrie's 'evil'. Between Carrie's out-of-control revenge and Margaret's constantly simmering betrayal, I don't see any way King could have ...
The book cover of The Philosopher: Habermas and Us by Philipp Felsch Der Philosoph: Habermas und wir , Philipp Felsch, Propyläen Verlag, 256 pp., €24, February 2024
Irene Taylor, the director of the Celine Dion documentary now streaming on Prime Video, discusses capturing the singer during some her most vulnerable moments.
I don't know maybe it is just my vivid fantasy, but the painted psychological horror felt by Carrie was very realistic and easy to emphasize with. The book had depth that I didn't expect while still maintaining easy to read tone to keep me from becoming bored or frustrated. It was easy to read but still emotionally engaging book.
At Karen Read's murder trial, prosecutors accuse her of drunken crash while defense alleges a vast police cover-up
View community ranking In the Top 10% of largest communities on Reddit Carrie Book Review. comments sorted by Best Top New Controversial Q&A Add a Comment
A place to discuss, recommend & review fantasy romance books! Members Online An unusual request: give me your best romantasy with minimal worldbuilding, please!
The subreddit about everything in the Galaxy Book family. This includes the Galaxy Book, Galaxy Book2, Galaxy Book S, Galaxy Book Ion, and Galaxy Book Flex. This also includes the previous generation Notebook series, and ATIV series.