An man long devoted to intellectual pursuits comes down from his ivory tower in a final bid for love, but finds himself defenseless in the real world, where people do not understand him but are happy to harness his prestige for their own purposes.Benn Crader is a world famous botanist, but he also is a soft-hearted man, as you will know when you encounter the quotation that includes the book's title.Will the great scientist protect his special intellectual gifts, or will he allow the pressures of his new, very materialistic adopted family to destroy him?It's a great premise for a novel, and Bellow covers many, many of its implications and takes the story to a logical yet surprising ending.Bellow's narrator, Crader's admiring nephew, often takes off on tangents to ruminate on current events, the contemporary intellectual scene and various intellectual pursuits.Some of these tangents seem to fit into the story better than others, and once in a while I got frustrated and found myself paging ahead to see when he would stop ruminating and start telling the darn story again.Yet Bellow's intellectual meanderings include many interesting observations about life, and taken as a whole, they help to build a textured world around the story."More Die of Heartbreak" is not a literary classic, but it is worth reading.Click Here to see more reviews about: More Die of Heartbreak (Paperback)
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