War and Peace Signet Price Review

337 of 344 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars The Eye of God, December 22, 1999
By Dennis Dalman (St. Cloud, Minnesota) See all my reviews This review is from: War and Peace (Penguin Classics) (Paperback) since I was a teen (I’m 51) I tried reading War and Peace. The furthest I ever got somethed like Page 80. Six summers ago, I thought, what , give it another shot. After Page 100 or the book picked up steam, and I was totally awed as I have seldom been by all the great books I have read in my life. That is what I want to share with possible readers of this great book. Stick with it. It is like a trickling stream that grows and grows from many tributaries into a great large raging river. It is got everything in it, as if it were written by God. Tolstoy saw everything. There are so many, many unforgettable scenes in it. My favorite two are the costume party at the country estate (pure magic!) and the great wolf hunting scene in which the wolf really takes on a personality under the all knowing skill of Tolstoy’s great pen. In just a line or two, Tolstoy could really get inside the "soul" of an animal! I can only imagine how great this book is in the original Russian. After War and Peace, I devoured Anna Karenina, which is in many ways an greater book. I’d recommend people read War and Peace with Cliff’s Notes, as I did, because you get a sense of the historical background and it assists you from to get the hundreds of characters mixed up. War and Peace is more than a novel. It is an Everest of creation. Stick with it!

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273 of 286 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars Simply one of the best books ever written, December 1, 1999
By Doug Vaughn See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER) This review is from: War and Peace (Penguin Classics) (Paperback) I 1st tried to read War and Peace in High School. A teacher, who had carried the book all through the Pacific campaign in WWII suggested it as a book that had changed his life. I tried three times and could not get past some hundred pages due to many characters each with many names. The 4th time I stuck with it and has been rewarded with a reading experience that has seldom been equaled. Since that time I have reread the book every two or three years, so I must have been through it 15 or more times, and every time I find things I have not noticed before.This is such a great book by number of characters in all levels of Russian society, historical scope, period detail, philosophical implications, romance, drama, tragedy, action etc, etc, etc. There’s just no way to enumerate all that’s appealing about Tolstoy’s masterpiece. The major characters are as humanly complex and interesting as real people. I feel that I know them like friends. The plot(s) are involving and get more tight and interconnected as the book progresses, so that there’s a great satisfaction as different threads come together, and never with the jarring coincidences that move a common Dickins novel.If I had to pick only one novel that I could ever be able to read again, it could must be War and Peace. There’s so most of interest going on in this book that it could be hard to wear it out in a lifetime.

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229 of 243 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars Life., July 9, 2002
By miked99 (New York, NY) See all my reviews This review is from: War and Peace (Penguin Classics) (Paperback) Over the 4 week period it took me to read "War and Peace", I has been asked some number of times by friends and co workers who saw me with the book why it was so long. At 1st, I really did not have a good answer though I felt I knew why. Having finished it, I could tell them that its length is caused by its being a thorough novel covering nearly every part of life overall. This may be said about some number of books clearly, but in "War and Peace", Tolstoy covers human life more completely than, though maybe not also as, any other book I have encountered."War and Peace" lets us follow along in the daily lives of some number of land owning class characters from early 19th Century Russia. The Bolkonsky and Rostov families comprise most of these figures, but their friends and acquaintances take up almost as most of the concentrate of Tolstoy’s classic novel. These characters cover a large range of personalities from the devoutly religious Maria Bolkonsky and her close and conflicted friend Natasha Rostov to the independent Pierre Bezuhov and his depressing wife Helene Kuragin. Tolstoy can go in and out of his creations’ lives with simplicity and without exaggeration, if its in relating the common times of their daily lives or the climaxes of their earthly existences. The range of emotions, feelings, and actions that Tolstoy can relate is easily done through his genius in setting the story in the midst of Russia’s War of 1812 (the history of which he knew well), one of the worst in its long history. It is through such a life shattering event that people may be seen everywhere from their best to their worst, and Tolstoy, through a compelling story line and the novel’s famous length, displays the complete spectrum.I still love Dostoevsky’s writing more, usually due to difference in the conclusions his characters come to in their cathartic times, but "War and Peace" gave me a much greater respect for Tolstoy than I had earlier held (having read Anna Karenina, among others). I certainly recommend taking the time to read this classic.

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