Naked Words Surrendered

In , the Reverend Frederick Kates, rector of Saint Paul's Church in Baltimore, Maryland , included "Desiderata" in a compilation of devotional materials for his congregation. The compilation included the church's foundation date, "Old Saint Paul's Church, Baltimore AD ," which readers subsequently took, and sometimes still do take, to be the date of the poem's composition. In , Robert L. Bell acquired the publishing rights from Bruce Humphries Publishing Company, where he was president, and then bought the copyright from Richard Wright, nephew and heir to the Ehrmann works.

In August , the poem was published in Success Unlimited magazine, without permission from Robert L. In a lawsuit against the magazine's publisher, Combined Registry Co. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the poem. For other uses, see Desiderata disambiguation. Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Strive to be happy. Retrieved on 18 August The goal with remembering phrases is to be able to look at your hand total and immediately recite the rule in your head, without having to see what the dealer has.

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Am I ready for the casino? We want to be like Mike, so we teach that you are probably making 2 or 3 mistakes in the casino for every one mistake you make in the distractionless, pressure-free, comfort of your home. If you keep messing up basic strategy, put it down for a while and come back to it. Deviations vary based on the rules of the game offered, and the rules of the region. However, this is NOT a feel good novel.

However it's my observation that author tried to depict the tortured nature of their souls by exploring their sexual desires and actions. I wish the reader could have been provided more than a glimpse of their inner feelings and motivations. I tried to judge the appropriateness of this book for a reading group. The book contains much good discussion material, but the emphasis on sexual matters could turn off many readers. I'll probably not recommend it. It's interesting to note that a book about the Battle of Solferino in Italy plays a symbolic role in this story.

That battle is a symbol of suffering leading to hope. The immense suffering caused by the Battle of Solferino and witnessed by Henry Dunant inspired him to a campaign which led to the founding of the Red Cross. Jan 04, Linda C rated it liked it Shelves: Hard to say exactly what I thought about this book. OK-- I thought many parts were beautifully written.

I also thought it was way too long, yet the character development was way too thin. For having so many pages, the author didn't seem to know what to do with them. Three stars is maybe a little harsh, but the book wasn't worthy of four, so, without a half star option, three it is. The book started out strongly-- you really felt that you were in the rice paddies, on the train, starving with Well. The book started out strongly-- you really felt that you were in the rice paddies, on the train, starving with June and her family. The sections of the book set in Korea and China were definitely the best parts of the book.

Unfortunately, the book jumped from past to present and the present day sections weren't as well written. They had "issues", if you will. I couldn't believe that Hector's experiences were so damaging that he became this shell of a man. I just didn't get it. Many people survive worse and go on to have some kind of meaningful life. Hector's barroom experiences, relationship with Dora Dora herself, in fact , relationship with the Korean friend, etc.

None of it was that interesting and could have been covered in a dozen pages instead of a dozen chapters. I truly didn't care about the Korean friend, the money the friend owed to the dying mobster, the mobster's dead daughter-- none of it had any relationship to the story except as background on Hector. In a similar vein, while June's war experiences were horrible, they didn't fully explain her adult actions-- in particular, her relationship with her son. Speaking of the son, it was difficult to believe that a 22 year old would leave for Europe, never to be seen again.

Sure, June wasn't a perfect mother, but she wasn't that bad, and there was nothing to really explain why Nicholas vanished, except that the author needed him to disappear to move the story forward.

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Also, June had this husband that we knew nothing about, except a couple of brief mentions about the marriage and his death. Since he sounded like a normal guy, I was troubled by the fact that he never met his stepson, or seemed to care that his wife had a vanished son. None of it was believable. Lastly, there was the "book. What was it about this book that sent a dying woman to end her life in a small Itialian town?

But at the end of the day, it was just a book, loved by Sylvie because it had come from her parents, and loved by June because it came from Sylvie. Perhaps if June had given it her her son, he would never have left for Europe.

Oops, then we wouldn't have had a reason to go to Europe to look for him and there goes half of the story. You know, maybe that wouldn't have been a bad thing.

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Feb 22, switterbug Betsey rated it it was amazing. There are a few prized novels in memory that ransacked me raw and bare while simultaneously enveloping me whole and full. This is a glittering example of one, a slow burn of a book that ignites slowly, gradually, like kindling around a giant bole. For the first half of the book, I admit, I wasn't seduced. I wasn't taken or thrown or fiercely engaged. For approximately pages I held on ambivalently. Even my reader's body language was telling--the pages at arm's length, the angle of my body twi There are a few prized novels in memory that ransacked me raw and bare while simultaneously enveloping me whole and full.

Even my reader's body language was telling--the pages at arm's length, the angle of my body twisted away from the book. I was impatient for a gainful lift-off. I was poised to relinquish it for another. I needed a release, a cry, a laugh, a scream of my own. But there were embers flaring below the text.

I trusted in the story's elemental power, despite my lack of commitment, even though I wasn't yet appreciably moved. I respected its lean, stark, clean, atmospheric prose, and the elegant construction, but I didn't know if it was gathering momentum or dust. Was the story going to progress in one plaintive note? Fortunately, I stayed with it, because once it does reach that point of critical mass about halfway, give or take several dozen pages , it sears you with its ferocity. The narrative tension accelerates; the symbols and motifs are in full bloom; and the raw power of this epic story is manifest.

And, although it is austere--OK, bleak--it is not relentlessly dreary as a reading experience. There is an exciting current of electricity that carries you to astonishing emotional depths. It has contours, corners, cusps. I don't want to tell readers too much, and I urge you not to read reviews that give away major plot points and milestones in this powerful journey of redemption. The experience of turning the pages in discovery is paramount to its visceral, immediate pleasure.

But even if you have already read bits about these characters or circumstances, nothing can remove the lingering exaltation once you close the final pages. This is a tour de force that is impossible to shake off. The characters are fleshed out and organic in every aspect of being.

They are coiled, agonized individuals, but what makes them so tremendous is their brazen tenacity. They are cultural outsiders, alienated and severed, but savagely resilient. They are singular, wretched creatures who infinitely penetrate the reader--cruel but sympathetic, elusive and yet naked, authentically human. June Han is a refugee from the Korean War when she is brought to an orphanage in the early 's.

By the age of 11, she had already suffered devastating adversity, enduring periodic starvation and witnessing unspeakable violence. Hector Brennan is a benighted ex-GI from Ilion, New York, a damaged young man who is already shorn of any noble ideals, depraved and sodden with whoring and drink, and who comes to the orphanage to work the physically strenuous jobs of construction and repair. Sylvie Tanner is the comely and mercurial wife of the Reverend Ames Tanner.

She is the daughter of missionaries and is accustomed to being uprooted and exposed to shocking conditions. Sylvie and her husband oversee and teach at the orphanage with dedication and generous benevolence. Sylvie has a haunting past and is drawn to June's gripping isolation; Hector's derelict history and provocative good looks are equal burdens; June is terrified and truculent, insatiable, greedy for Sylvie's maternal love; all three are hollowed out and tormented.

Through Lee's brilliant and tightly controlled narrative, the past is gradually revealed--brick by brick--masterfully, woven into and through the story as it takes place thirty years hence. At this future juncture, June is searching for her prodigal son, which is the seed for the redemptive action of the book and its germane themes of identity, love, and dislocation. In every pore of this story, from the desolate, burnt, and barren fields of Korea, to the grey skies and filthy streets of Hector's seedy, combative youth, to the shabby, brittle, and frail hope of the orphanage, war communicates its harsh lessons.

This is a shattering, phenomenal masterpiece. If someone asked me to describe my response to this novel, I would say, "I am undone, I am complete. Jun 03, Expanding Bookshelf rated it liked it.

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The action swerves back and forth among s China, s Korea and New York City in , when June, battling stomach cancer at age 47, is shuttering her successful Manhattan antiques shop and preparing for yet another journey. With her illness closing in on her, June plans to fly to Italy for a final reunion with her son, Nicholas, whom she raised alone while stoically building her business.

Nicholas departed hastily for Europe after his high school graduation eight years ago and has contacted his mother only for money since. Moving forward, the scenes in the mission, interspersed throughout the book, are generally well told. However, the scenes set in the 80s seem flat. The main problem with the book is that compared to June, Hector and Sylvie are just not as compelling. And Hector has only one note from the beginning. Named after the epic hero, his only miraculous quality seems to be that his liver has somehow managed to remain intact after decades of compulsive drinking. Contrast this with June, who blazes with obstinate life at every point of her journey: In tracing the long-term effects of warfare, Chang-Rae Lee has a powerful theme.

But it is difficult to maintain interest in damaged characters who, even through no fault of their own, are only half functioning as human beings. Sylvie is addicted to drugs; Hector is a compulsive drinker; June is so far gone in her sickness that her actions are unpredictable, and even in the orphanage it appears that her moral compass is damaged or missing. They are all half-people at best. Although we sympathize with their tragedy, and even discern glimmers of goodness among the psychic rubble, they make poor companions on a long journey to a place that is not very meaningful anyway.

May 28, Eugenia Kim added it. What happens to life after you survive the atrocities and randomness of war?

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From that common crossroad, the lives of Sylvie, a missionary wife, Hector, a G. This book is rich in that tradition. I have tagged more than one hundred sections that moved me to wonderment. It is an intense and absorbing read, frightening for what we do to ourselves and how, despite all the darkness and violence we create in the name of war, some continue to persist in a semblance of life, and helplessly pass along the damage of war to those they touch as they reach out with a last shred of hopefulness.

Is it all in vain? May 21, Mark rated it did not like it Shelves: War is hell, a fact that is on display in nearly every war-related piece of fiction that does not somehow involve John Wayne. Less often explored is the toll that war takes on the civilians who are in the affected areas. Still less often explored is the Korean War, which is important to the plot here. The Surrendered could have filled a void and been one of those books that, while a work of fiction, kind of opens your eyes to something you never really thought about.

It would have been this excep War is hell, a fact that is on display in nearly every war-related piece of fiction that does not somehow involve John Wayne. It would have been this except for the fact that it is so full of depressing things that you can't do anything except ask, "Was all that really necessary? The Painted Bird , for instance, was a total gut punch from start to finish, but it never felt manipulative, to me.

The problem with The Surrendered is that every last detail that is filled in is depressing. You can't take it seriously after a while.

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Let's look at the three principal characters for illustration. Her father is a suspected Communist supporter and is probably killed. Brother conscripted, captured and reconscripted by the North. Mother and older sister are blown up by a bomb as they shelter in a military truck which bomber flyover was the only thing that stopped an attempted rape.

She has two younger siblings who end up in her orbit after this. They try to hitch a train all the way to the south towards some vaguely-remembered relatives. A bump in the rail knocks both off the side and each separately has a limb amputated by the train and they die. In the part of the story that takes place in , she has grown up to be abandoned by the son she raised as a single mother, she has been widowed by the husband she found late in life and she is dying of stomach cancer. He only joins the Army because his father, kind of a drunk, drowns in a canal after falling, drunk, into it.

This is why he enlists later when the Korean conflict erupts. He encounters the re-conscripted brother of 1 he doesn't know this at the time, of course who thanks to some cruelty of his fellow soldiers is pushed off a cliff; 2 tries to save him but 1 would rather die, pulling a grenade and holding it just long enough to get away. Later, we discover that as a boy he was in a choir at a Catholic church until the priest tried to abuse him. This is when I stopped reading; this detail on top of all the rest was too much for me to take seriously.

The wife of a missionary priest who comes to run a Korean orphanage. After the incident described above he is reassigned to the Graves Unit, meaning he works - with black soldiers, mostly - with dead bodies.

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Her parents were killed horribly, while she watched, by Japanese soldiers who were invading China her parents also being missionaries , and she later became an opium addict. There is misery for all who are swept up by war, including the forgotten; for some, there is nothing but misery. But this book is just piling on at every turn. There is no comic relief, hardly any kind of levity at all.

Every detail filled in is maximum suffering for its characters, even the throwaway details like "new sort-of girlfriend is singing so character 2 sings along and thinks about how he used to be in a choir. You can't get emotionally involved in a story that is transparently and gratuitously trying to tug every heart string at every possible little turn.

This being a book of historical fiction I thought I would get a little more history than I did. There is very little in this book about either the Korean War or the Japanese takeover of Manchuria in the s. There is another thread, set in s when June, now elderly and d This being a book of historical fiction I thought I would get a little more history than I did.

There is another thread, set in s when June, now elderly and dying, searches for her son in Italy. Although this may all sound confusing, it is not hard to follow, but that doesn't make it good! I felt no empathy for any of the characters, I learned little history and the book totally lacks humor. It is all about some weird relationships. In a good author's hands, weird relationships may become tantalizing, but not here.

Perhaps I am being overly critical. There is a message; history sets a stamp upon the lives of those who live through it. I do admit it is hard to follow a book as excellent as To the End of the Land , which both taught history and magnificently rendered a triangle love relationship. The author, Chang-rae Lee, never brought the characters even within arms-lengths. Always they remained at a distance, and for this reason I have only given The Surrendered two stars. Not terrible, but just OK.

View all 5 comments. Nov 27, Albert Yee rated it it was amazing. Gut wrenchingly sad and modestly joyful in alternating scenes. A racing crescendo bounding toward and end, but backward and forward in time. I stretched the reading of this book out too far, but still felt its grip as if I had never put it down. It's for people with a bleak outlook on life and think that there may not really be happiness outside of leaving this world. It's for people who think that the world is comprised of half truths and lies with certainty found only in the end.

This isn't a li Gut wrenchingly sad and modestly joyful in alternating scenes. This isn't a lighthearted read by any extent, but it will leave you at ease at the end. Mar 02, Felice rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: I think I have read one of the novels that will be on everyone's top ten list next fall, The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee.

Are you thinking that given Lee's track record: Well I would agree with you if The Surrendered was the spare, wonderful portraits that those novels were, but it is not. Surrenderd is a Grand Scale novel. It is a quest for redemption, a search for survivors looking for forgiveness..

The novel is told in flashback and that works perfectly for this book. As you meet the characters you are charmed by their imperfections. You fall in love and dread the revelations to come.

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June is a Korean War survivor. At age 11 she and her family were forced by the War to abandon their home. They struggled to make it to safety at a relatives house but along the way June lost her family one by one Hector is also a survivor of the Korean War. He was an American GI immersed in the carnage until discharged. Blaming himself for the death of his Father back home and not having anywhere to go he stayed in Korea.

June and Hector's lives intersect for the first time at a Korean orphanage. There they meet Sylvie. She and her minister husband run the orphanage. Sylvie has her own tortured past having witnessed the Japanese kill her missionary parents in Manchuria. All three people have already survived horrendous experiences leaving them more damaged then they realize. This leads to a time bomb relationship between the three characters. I am not going to go beyond this small explanation of plot. This has given you the most basic of starting points.

I could go on to describe more of the storyline but that list would do nothing to convey the vivid intensity of those same events written by Lee's elegant pen and broad range. My list would come off as melodrama whereas that kind of storytelling is completely removed from this novel.