Summary and Reviews of Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

Specimen Days

by Michael Cunningham
  • Critics' Consensus (7):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • First Published:
  • Jun 1, 2005, 320 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Apr 2006, 352 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

"A smashing literary tour de force and an utterly invigorating reading experience. If this book does not make you jump up from the sofa, looking at life and literature in new ways, check to see if you have a pulse." --USA Today.

In each section of Michael Cunningham's bold new novel, his first since The Hours, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. "In the Machine" is a ghost story that takes place at the height of the industrial revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities of the new machine age. "The Children's Crusade," set in the early twenty-first century, plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band that is detonating bombs, seemingly at random, around the city. The third part, "Like Beauty," evokes a New York 150 years into the future, when the city is all but overwhelmed by refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth.

Presiding over each episode of this interrelated whole is the prophetic figure of the poet Walt Whitman, who promised his future readers, "It avails not, neither time or place . . . I am with you, and know how it is." Specimen Days is a genre-bending, haunting, and transformative ode to life in our greatest city and a meditation on the direction and meaning of America's destiny. It is a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

Bookpage - Robert Weibezahl
Specimen Days is really three individually compelling stories that together form something greater. Cunningham's audacious eye, his ability to hone an unexpected image from an unlikely source, is in sharp focus, and the prowess he showed in The Hours for getting inside his character's heads is still in evidence.

USA Today
A smashing literary tour de force and an utterly invigorating reading experience. If this book does not make you jump up from the sofa, looking at life and literature in new ways, check to see if you have a pulse.

Vanity Fair - Elissa Schappel
[Walt Whitman's] boundless spirit . . . imbues Specimen Days with a sense of wonder and magic.

O, the Oprah magazine - Vince Passaro
With imaginative daring and sentiment hardened by intellect and pain, Cunningham constructs three tales of New York...This is an astonishing accomplishment and the best book Cunningham has written.

Booklist - Donna Seaman
Starred Review. Brilliantly conceived, empathic, darkly humorous, and gorgeously rendered, Cunningham's galvanizing novel [is] about the quest for justice and freedom, the parameters of the soul, the hunger for beauty, and the fluid interface between the natural and the engineered.

Kirkus Reviews - Bruce Allen
The use of several recurring images (an ornamental white bowl, a fire in a sewing machine factory) and Whitman's visionary idealism superbly underscore a symphonic poem of sorrow, loss, survival - and hope: Cunningham's finest novel, and one of the important literary achievements of the new century.

Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Engaging Walt Whitman as his muse, Cunningham weaves a captivating, strange and extravagant novel of human progress and social decline. .... This is daring, memorable fiction.

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Beyond the Book



Walter Whitman (1819-1892) was born in Long Island, New York where his father worked as a carpenter and farmer.  He was educated in Brooklyn until the age of 12, after which he left school to work as an office boy, and soon after as a printer's assistant.  During the next few years he contributed articles to newspapers (including some of the earliest coverage of baseball games) and taught in various schools.  In 1838 he founded, and was the first editor of, the Huntington based Long Islander newspaper (which still exists today).  He continued to educate himself by attending the opera, theatre and through copious reading, and also found time to edit a couple of other newspapers including the Brooklyn...

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