Journey If Where You're Going Isn't Home Book 1 edition by Max Zimmer Literature Fiction eBooks
Download As PDF : Journey If Where You're Going Isn't Home Book 1 edition by Max Zimmer Literature Fiction eBooks 
Journey, recipient of a Foreword Clarion Five Star Review, is the first book of the coming-of-age trilogy If Where You're Going Isn't Home by prize-winning short story writer and author Max Zimmer.
Spring of 1956. Shake Tauffler hears a line of music on the radio of a cattle truck and discovers his dream to play jazz trumpet. His family is moving one last time – from a southern Utah ranch to a town outside Salt Lake – on his father’s quest to bring his family from Switzerland to the heartland of the Mormon church. In two months, when he turns twelve, he’ll join his buddies on a shared journey through the ranks, rituals, lessons, and duties of his father’s take-no-prisoners religion. At the same time, armed with a used trumpet and his bike, he’ll start another journey, on his own, to a place whose high priests aren’t his father’s friends but the negro greats of jazz, men he’s supposed to believe are cursed but from whose music he learns everything he dreams of being.
Shaded with Huck Finn and James Dean, Shake Tauffler is an American kid we all recognize, a kid who responds to bigotry, abuse, hypocrisy, and even death with courage, humor, heartbreak, often pain, and always wonder. His rites of passage are keenly drawn and vividly familiar. But his ten-year story of growing up Mormon in America takes us to an altogether different place. Lyrical, rowdy, unflinching, Journey follows Shake across the first four years of his ten-year search for the clarity and flight of a trumpet line to lift him like a steel bird out from under the iron sky of his faith and guide him to sexual, moral, and musical consciousness. It is a search that resolves – for now – in startling and extraordinary tenderness.
Michael Strong, literary agent and co-founder of Zola Books, describes the book this way
“Max Zimmer has written The Great American Mormon Novel. For decades, readers have depended upon a few extraordinary writers to understand fully what it means to be an American – Philip Roth, Julia Alvarez, Ralph Ellison, Erica Jong, John Updike. Zimmer has added a critical new dimension to our shared national understanding of who we are and how we got here in this sweeping narrative. Twelve-year-old Shake Tauffler’s decade-long journey through the Mormon Church and beyond will resonate with all Americans who ponder their soul and place in our changing national portrait.”
Journey If Where You're Going Isn't Home Book 1 edition by Max Zimmer Literature Fiction eBooks
Max Zimmer's Journey "If Where Your Going Isn't Home ". What an amazing journey Max has taken me on in his first novel. As an avid reader, I have read some wonderful books in my time, Few of these books have touched me in a way that I would eagerly recommend them to anyone weather your young or old READ Max's Zimmer book, you will do yourself a disservice by not adding this great book to your list. Shake, is us, you and it's me, growing up. How in our younger years, the people who believed in us, whether or not they were family, or those (strangers) or friends who briefly entered our lives to form the person(s) we will become. Shake, even though I'm a girl made me remember the years of my youth. A youth that I thought was mundane. He helped me to realize that all was planned and we are all special and as we learn, touch and grow, we pass these along to all. For as Shake touched me He also touched others. I can't wait till book 2 comes out. I highly encourage reading this book to all. This book will and should be a Classic and required reading for 7th grade through college. Hollywood Directors, should be knocking on Max's door to make his Journey into a motion picture. Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, Spielberg etc. Start the bidding. Way to Go Shake, Thanks Max for letting me make this Journey with you.Product details
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Journey If Where You're Going Isn't Home Book 1 edition by Max Zimmer Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
I've loved reading books and being read to my whole life. I have early memories of my mother reading to me about Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh but in my 76 years there are only three or four books that I've read that I've thought enough about to read again. The Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian is one; Dune by Frank Herbert is another. Max Zimmer's "Journey" has joined the list.
"Journey If Where You're Going Isn't Home" won a place in my heart as one of the books that I will not only read twice (I already have), but three times, four times, five times and perhaps even more. Zimmer has created a character in Shake Tauffler that I really care about. It's been a long time since I've been so captivated by an author's fictional creation. Shake's story is told in the first person so we see what he sees; we experience what he experiences and we feel what he feels. His friends are funny, his friends are tragic. His friends stand up for him and one betrays him. He has a crush on one girl but by the time he finally gets to talk to her he finds her vapid and shallow. He stands up to bullies and pays the price. He is everyman.
Shake learns about the religion he has not chosen but is born into in the Mormon classroom. He receives his religious education from engaging but flawed characters. Is this the author's way of telling us that the information Shake is taught is as flawed as his teachers' characters?
Shake's journey from the ranch to Bountiful is a metaphor for his life to be in "Journey". From simplicity to abundance, from innocence to awakening. From tyro to expert. From boyhood to pre-man. I can't wait for Book 2.
Max Zimmer has written an extraordinary revelation of life in a Mormon community in a way no one else has ever done. The novel tells the coming-of-age story of Shake Tauffler, a Mormon boy who was given the gift, or curse, of musical talent. Unlike most novelists who veer toward the polemic when writing about the Mormon culture, Zimmer allows Shake to discover both the good and the bad-- the sublime and the evil-- of the Mormon church and the Utah society as he struggles to define himself in terms of his passion for the instrument God has given him.
This is not the stuff of Big Love pyrotechnics; this is the real, compelling and revealing look into the demands of faith as Shake and his young friends take their first steps into adulthood during the 1950's and 60's. While the novel does not deal with the privileged life Mitt Romney knew when he was young, it does a splendid job of representing the day-to-day life of faith Romney would have experienced. Shake, like Romney and all young Mormon men, is elevated to the Aaronic priesthood at 12. We see him baptized in proxy within the temple for the souls who have died. All the great questions of the priesthoods' mysticism and empowerment are dealt with frankly and in the most human manner. Through Shake, the novel reveals the courage it takes to be different in such a community, and it reveals the dynamic that might cause a less courageous young man to bully others who are different. For instance, the sort of young man who would bully a gay person.
But the great craft of this book is that it neither demonizes nor sanctifies its characters. And it neither demonizes nor sanctifies the Mormon church and faith. Zimmer presents his wonderful, quirky and often hilarious cast with affection for all their foibles and strengths. This is the Mormon church and community I came to know during my years in Utah. This is the character of a community of `the elect,' with all its strengths and weaknesses. This is the book to read if you want to know the character of presidential candidate who was nurtured in this garden.
I have just finished Book 2 of this trilogy. After reading the fabulous reviews just now of Book 1, I don't know what else I can say except I loved both books. Max Zimmer is a truly gifted writer. I've now read about 10 years of Shake's life (the boy at the center of these stories, and truly one of the most interesting characters I have gotten to know -- and I read a lot!). I have enjoyed every single word. These are poetic novels, IMO, in the sense that they simply require you to go slow and catch every phrase, every piece of this story -- and yet not a bit cumbersome. A total absence of cliches and "oh hum" moments, ever word important.. Having lived in Utah for 6 years, and about the same time as this story, I found myself flooded with memories, and Zimmer has captured the essence of growing up in Mormonism, and his struggle to fit the mold, when his soul was crying out for something else. I cannot wait for Book #3.
Max Zimmer's Journey "If Where Your Going Isn't Home ". What an amazing journey Max has taken me on in his first novel. As an avid reader, I have read some wonderful books in my time, Few of these books have touched me in a way that I would eagerly recommend them to anyone weather your young or old READ Max's Zimmer book, you will do yourself a disservice by not adding this great book to your list. Shake, is us, you and it's me, growing up. How in our younger years, the people who believed in us, whether or not they were family, or those (strangers) or friends who briefly entered our lives to form the person(s) we will become. Shake, even though I'm a girl made me remember the years of my youth. A youth that I thought was mundane. He helped me to realize that all was planned and we are all special and as we learn, touch and grow, we pass these along to all. For as Shake touched me He also touched others. I can't wait till book 2 comes out. I highly encourage reading this book to all. This book will and should be a Classic and required reading for 7th grade through college. Hollywood Directors, should be knocking on Max's door to make his Journey into a motion picture. Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, Spielberg etc. Start the bidding. Way to Go Shake, Thanks Max for letting me make this Journey with you.
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