Let The Great World Spin Sparknotes

Colum McCann’s 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spin is a riveting novel about love, death, and the ability of the human spirit to prevail in the midst of extreme tragedy and loss. The book opens as the citizens of Manhattan gaze into the sky with disbelief and awe as they view the Twin Towers tight rope walker, Philippe Petit, a French acrobat who is one hundred and ten feet in the air in August, 1974. Although Petit opens the introduction of the book, the actual true main characters are the ordinary everyday people down below. Petit’s death defying feat was a central event within book to display the lives of the rest of the characters inside the book. Even with New York City’s population being in the millions, McCann demonstrates to the

The first loss illustrated was the absence of their father. He left when the boys were very young and their mother dies when the boys are in their teens. As a young boy, Corrigan begins to help others by sneaking out at night and giving blankets to homeless drunkards. He tells his mother when he is small, he is “doing God’s work”. He goes down a path of drugs and alcohol himself, eventually becoming an Irish Monk with his own personal demons to battle. As a New York Citizen, he shares his apartment with prostitutes and visits a nursing home regularly. Ciaran says, “What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth- the filth, the war, the poverty- was that life could be capable of small beauties”. Corrigan found fulfilment in helping others. Ciaran stated, “Corrigan wanted other people’s pain, he didn’t want to deal with his own”. The benevolence Corrigan showed to those who were down and out brought beauty and purpose to his own life as well as a distraction from the pain he felt. Corrigan falls in love with Adelita who is a nurse in the nursing home. He is torn because he knows their love is forbidden since he has a vow of celibacy because he is a priest. A dreadful accident prevents the reader from knowing what choice he would end up making concerning their

Their loss was of their sons who died at war in Vietnam. Claire hosts a support group in her home for grieving mothers who lost their sons. As the story unfolds, a tragic car accident kills Corrigan and Jazzlyn, a young prostitute. Gloria, one of the members of the support group ends up fostering Jazzlyn’s two young daughters after her tragic death. Gloria’s motherly love had a second chance to blossom in the lives of these young