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	hand. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.
		A pointer, as on a gauge or dial.
		Involvement or participation: “In all this was evident the hand of the counterrevolutionaries” (John Reed).
		To carry, strike, or propel (the ball) with the hand or arm in violation of the rules in soccer.
	www.bartleby.com /61/3/H0040300.html (883 words)

	The Fourth Hand \| The Onion - America's Finest News Source (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Hand takes on the episodic structure of Irving's signature novels (A Prayer For Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules) without the elaborate plot to back that structure up; as a result, it feels random, dogmatic, and easily distracted.
		Fourth Hand could almost be a treatise on obsession, if it weren't so clinical, and if there weren't so many extraneous factoids and overdeveloped but underutilized characters packing the space between snippets of the paltry storyline.
		Fourth Hand is no exception, but in this limited space, the imbalance between desire and action is established but not explored, leaving it baldly apparent and painfully awkward.
	www.theonion.com /content/node/20288 (494 words)

	Amazon.de: The Fourth Hand: English Books: John Irving (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		The Fourth Hand is a wonderfully funny and compulsive novel, which manages to encapsulate Irving's hallmark fl humour with an incredibly tender pathos and gentle wisdom.
		Above all, The Fourth Hand is a wonderful and lyrical love story, which is destined to become a classic.
		Hand fehlt, sondern auch ein guter Schluß, 10.
	www.amazon.de /Fourth-Hand-John-Irving/dp/0747554323 (1551 words)

	Syd Allan: Review of "The Fourth Hand", by John Irving
		My answer to the first question will not likely satisfy you: The Fourth Hand is about the same thing that all of John Irving's books are about -- interesting people with odd little eccentricities interact with each other in compelling ways that remind you of things in your own life.
		A woman in Wisconsin, Doris Clausen, convinces her husband Otto to sign a document which pledges his own hand to Patrick in the event of Otto's death.
		The losing, and re-gaining, and losing again of Patrick's hand is a good metaphor for other things which end, and begin.
	www.jagular.com /fourthhand.shtml (2034 words)

	CNN.com - Review: Irving's 'Hand' should be slapped - July 30, 2001
		The plot of "The Fourth Hand" concerns Patrick Wallingford, a reporter for a low-rent all-news TV network who loses his hand to a lion while covering a circus in India.
		Otto's wife, Doris, had sent Zajac a letter offering her husband's hand while Otto was still alive and healthy; in a typical Irving twist, the hand becomes available when he accidentally shoots himself while sitting in his beer truck on Super Bowl Sunday.
		These are fine subjects for an essay, but in "The Fourth Hand," they come off as the invective of a crank and slow the book to a crawl.
	archives.cnn.com /2001/SHOWBIZ/books/07/30/review.hand/index.html (837 words)

	Compare Prices and Read Reviews on John Irving - The Fourth Hand: A Novel at Epinions.com
		Patrick's main claim to fame is that he lost his left hand -- live on camera, no less -- to a bored lion in an Indian circus.
		Nick Zajac, the dog turd-flinging hand surgeon, is a more interesting -- and frankly more complex -- character than his famous patient, however he is relegated to but a bit part.
		And that is the failing of The Fourth Hand; for without the connection of reader to character that Irving has engendered so well in many previous works, even his marvelous sense of the absurd cannot pull this chestnut out of the fire.
	www.epinions.com /content_33950895748 (1588 words)

	Salon.com Books \| "The Fourth Hand" by John Irving
		Doris Clausen wants visitation rights with the hand, maybe because she's obsessed with Patrick from TV and actually arranged to have her husband's hand donated to him before the man died in a handgun accident -- or maybe because she truly loved her husband.
		When she squeezes his stump between her thighs, Patrick feels the phantom fingers of a "fourth hand" that symbolizes some kind of destiny fulfillment: "There were the two you were born with," Doris tells him.
		But perhaps "The Fourth Hand" is best seen as a transitional novel, moving Irving away from the Dickensian storytelling he's been entrenched in since "The World According to Garp." Could be he's heading toward a looser, more modern form.
	archive.salon.com /books/review/2001/07/13/irving/print.html (1113 words)

	The Fourth Hand - John Irving is God
		In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon awaits the opportunity to perform the nation's first hand transplant; meanwhile, in the distracting aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, the surgeon is seduced by his housekeeper.
		A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the reporter her husband's left hand-- that is, after her husband dies.
		A handsome TV newsman has his left hand chomped off by a hungry lion, and a former lacrosse star stays in shape by hurling dog turds into the Charles River...
	www.geocities.com /irvingophile/Hand.html (358 words)

	ReadingGroupGuides.com - The Fourth Hand by John Irving
		Clausen, on the other hand, is very much an adult; she is emotionally and psychologically complex.
		It was screenwriting that taught me how to tell a story without establishing the life of a main character in a childhood, and without a signi ficant passage of time.
		The Fourth Hand became her story; even the title is Mrs.
	www.readinggroupguides.com /guides3/fourth_hand2.asp (1973 words)

	Review \| The Fourth Hand by John Irving
		Let me be clear: She wants to visit her dead husband's hand, which is now attached to some other guy.
		But that tangent is tossed aside in favor of a terribly minor, not-very-illuminating subplot in which we learn that the doctor marries his kids' nanny, who turns out to be a bitch.
		The trouble with The Fourth Hand is this: A novel is a structure.
	www.januarymagazine.com /fiction/fourthhand.html (760 words)

	Fourth Hand Form - International Wing Chun Academy Forums
		I personally think it is a ridiculous and pointless exercise by the chinese government, that is my opinion but I have not the right to say whether sigung choses to endorse it or not.
		There are probably a small handful of people in the world who have come close to mastering the three empty handed Wing Chun forms.
		I'll see if I can find out more about this 'fourth form' as my opinion thus far is based on putitbluntly telling us that it combines the other three forms and Moliu's submission that it was created to unite the Wing Chun community.
	www.wingchun.com.au /forums/art/1803-fourth-hand-form.html (1228 words)

	John Irving's The Fourth Hand
		John Irving’s novel is filled with attractive, successful, famous characters whose lives are stocked with memorable episodes. In this case, the central character is a TV reporter, made world famous when his hand is devoured live on television by a hungry lion at an Indian circus.
		Big Otto’s “hand was not finished,” we are told late in the book, in its quest to conceive a child with Doris Clausen.
		This is supposed to explain why Wallingford had the hand for one year, and was then Wallingford’s body rejected the hand; the hand was finished with Wallingford.
	www.thesatirist.com /books/FourthHand.html (1015 words)

	The Fourth Hand (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		But he believed a new hand was what he wanted, and he'd alertly understood everything that could go medically wrong with the transplant.
		What he failed to realize explained why he had never before been much of an experimenter; he lacked the imagination to entertain the disquieting idea that the new hand would not be entirely his.
		And all the people in the newsroom in New York thought that the widowed trapeze artist had seemed"too calm"; they preferred their disaster victims to be hysterical...
	www.usatoday.com /life/books/fc/2001-06-25-the-fourth-hand.htm (2166 words)

	ReadingGroupGuides.com - The Fourth Hand by John Irving
		While reporting a story from India, New York journalist Patrick Wallingford inadvertently becomes his own headline when his left hand is eaten by a lion.
		In answering this unexpected question, John Irving has written a novel that is by turns brilliantly comic and emotionally moving, offering a penetrating look at the power of second chances and the will to change.
		Hands -- and Wallingford's "fourth hand "in particular -- represent many things in the novel.
	www.readinggroupguides.com /guides3/fourth_hand1.asp (728 words)

	eReader.com: Excerpt from The Fourth Hand
		Wallingford, in turn, had been dragged away from the lions' cage without realizing that his left hand and wrist were gone; yet he was aware that the lions were still fighting over something.
		Of course there was nothing to keep the watch from slipping off; his left hand and the big joint of his left wrist were missing, too.
		The determined professional had moved in close to the lions' cage, where the lions were caught in the act of not very agreeably sharing what little remained of Patrick's wrist and hand.
	www.ereader.com /product/book/excerpt/3010?book=The_Fourth_Hand (3919 words)

	Bookreporter.com - THE FOURTH HAND by John Irving
		It puzzled him that the attack reminded him of something mystifying his thesis adviser had said to him when she was breaking off their affair: “It’s been flattering, for a while, to be with a man who can so thoroughly lose himself in a woman.
		On the other hand, there’s so little you in you that I suspect you could lose yourself in any woman.” Just what on earth she could have meant by that, or why the eating of his hand had caused him to recall the complaining woman’s remarks, he didn’t know.
		But what chiefly distressed Wallingford, in the less-than-thirty seconds it took a lion to dispose of his wrist and hand, was that the arresting images of himself were not pictures of Patrick Wallingford as he had ever looked before.
	www.bookreporter.com /reviews/0345449347-excerpt.asp (7135 words)

	Irving fails to recreate magic with The Fourth Hand (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Occasionally writers come along who are able to create works 15, 20, even 30 years into their careers that are as good, if not better than, the earliest works that made them famous.
		The Fourth Hand, which is currently in its seventh week on The New York Times bestseller list at No. 7, tries very hard to carry on this tradition.
		The Fourth Hand finds a great writer in John Irving trying too hard to create another crazy novel to add to his legacy.
	www.collegian.psu.edu /archive/2001/09/09-06-01tdc/09-06-01darts-2.asp (533 words)

	ToxicUniverse.com - Irving, John - - The Fourth Hand Books Review
		The fourth hand was the ghost hand, the phantom pain Patrick felt after the transplant failed.
		The Fourth Hand has that detached, skipping-forward trademark of fairy tales, in which detailed scenes are sacrificed in favor of passages that bite off big chunks of time and thought.
		It’s a shame that The Fourth Hand is so disengaging, because there is, truth be told, some of Irving’s most skillful writing scattered here and there throughout the big, gray-toned paragraphs.
	www.culturedose.net /review.php?rid=10001966 (1171 words)

	The Best Reviews: John Irving, The Fourth Hand Review
		However, she demands hand visits and that he impregnate her in exchange for the extremity.
		THE FOURTH HAND is an entertaining condemnation of media excesses using loss, broken relationships and all under the news spotlight.
		Still, in the world according to John Irving, this second chance redemption tale is an emotional story that tackles the reader in a blitz and never lets go until atonement comes for one and all including a wristlocked overzealous reviewer.
	thebestreviews.com /book225 (257 words)

	BookSense.com
		It is an omission with a point, given the fact that Irving is both satirizing the lack of historical context in what currently passes for television news and examining the emptiness of the life of television journalist Patrick Wallingford.
		In the breathtaking first chapter, Wallingford, while on assignment in India, loses his hand to a circus lion when he instinctively turns to record the lion's roar and puts his hand too close to the cage.
		In fact, The Fourth Hand demonstrates again just how good John Irving is at dramatizing the positive and negative charges of familial love, especially the love of a father for a child.
	www.booksense.com /people/archive/irvingjohn.jsp (1115 words)

	Salon.com Books \| "The Fourth Hand" by John Irving (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		"The Fourth Hand," Irving's first novel since winning the Academy Award for the screenplay of "The Cider House Rules," is comparatively small.
		Patrick wants a new hand very badly, but his life goes on as before, anyhow: reporting on disasters for a third-rate news channel, sleeping with countless women thanks to his movie-star looks -- and never quite landing in the world.
		They also tend to be sexually inhibited or dysfunctional: The narrator of "A Prayer for Owen Meany" is celibate, as is Dr. Larch of "Cider House"; the hero of "Hotel New Hampshire" is erotically obsessed with his sister; Dr. Daruwalla of "Son of the Circus" is just a prude.
	dir.salon.com /books/review/2001/07/13/irving/index.html (834 words)

	John Irving \| About the Book
		A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the one-handed reporter her husband's left hand--that is, after her husband dies.
		Yet, in the end, The Fourth Hand is as realistic and emotionally moving as any of Mr.
		The Fourth Hand is characteristic of John Irving's seamless storytelling and further explores some of the author's recurring themes--loss, grief, love as redemption.
	www.randomhouse.com /features/johnirving/about_book.html (263 words)

	John Irving, The Fourth Hand (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Those who have read any of Irving's books may read the title of this one and assumed it was a freak-show type of book, perhaps dealing with a carnival atmosphere or, at the very least, be about a feuding team of pianists.
		For a time, Patrick is able to cope, even thrive, and achieve a certain cachet as the lion guy, so much so that an eminent hand surgeon in the area decides to start a website for people who might wish to donate a hand for transplant.
		Once Patrick meets the widow of the donor of the hand he ends up with, he is astonished to find that he will only gain the hand with some rather iron-clad clauses.
	www.rambles.net /irving_4thhand01.html (338 words)

	Amazon.com: The Fourth Hand: Books: John Irving,Jason Culp (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Clausen, the widow of the donor of his new left hand, is a plot point that is just given to us, rather than built up to.
		The overall premise/metaphor related to the loss of the protagonist's left hand seems labored and at times even silly; the characters on the whole seem wooden, unlikeable, and even worse, unmemorable; and the slightly sappy ending is all too predictable and Hollywood-esque.
		Journalist Patrick Wallingford loses his hand to a lion at a circus and becomes a News Item himself as opposed to just reporting it.However help is 'at hand ' (no pun intended) from a skilled surgeon.
	www.amazon.com /Fourth-Hand-John-Irving/dp/0375418954 (2184 words)

	Distortions at 4th Hand
		On the other hand, protests by some former anti-war individuals against alleged human rights violations in Vietnam are given generous coverage.
		He gives a grisly account of of what refugees have reported to him about the barbarity of their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.
		But this he rejects, on the ground that rice stocks in Phnom Penh would have sufficed for two months, with rationing (what he thinks would have happened after two months, with no new harvest, he does not say).
	www.zmag.org /zmag/articles/chombookrev.htm (3483 words)

	Evan Dodds - Non-work-related blog » The Fourth Hand
		Story is of a (disaster-style) news reporter who gets his left hand bitten off by a lion while reporting a story.
		Late in the book you find out the meaning of “the fourth hand”, a phrase I had been wondering about for much of the book.
		Couple of things that caught my attention… much of the story took place in Wisconsin, surrounding the Green Bay area (not far from where I grew up and even closer to where my sister Martha now lives) so there was a bit of familiarity there.
	blog.evandodds.com /2006/07/16/the-fourth-hand (455 words)

	Bookreporter.com - THE FOURTH HAND by John Irving
		THE FOURTH HAND lacks the complexity of many of his books, taking only token looks at most of the minor characters rather than the extended exploration such characters have merited in books like THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP or THE CIDER HOUSE RULES.
		In this relatively slim volume, Irving limited himself to a single extended side narrative --- that of the hand surgeon who performs the protagonist's hand transplant --- and his story, while well—told, does little to reveal the story of the major characters.
		THE FOURTH HAND, written nearly 30 years and many novels after THE WATER—METHOD MAN, may be a more finely crafted novel.
	www.bookreporter.com /reviews/0345449347.asp (457 words)

	Amazon.com: The Fourth Hand: Books: John Irving (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Medical ethicists reason that a hand, unlike a heart or a liver--essential organs conveniently housed out of sight--is in full view and one of a pair, arguably dispensable.
		Famous hand surgeon Nicholas Zajak is, for his part, obsessed with dog feces also described in endless detail which he scoops up with his old lacrosse stick and hurls at rowers on the Charles River.
		But maybe that's just the way the hand of fate is dealt, and we don't have much of a choice who we fall in love with.
	www.amazon.com /Fourth-Hand-John-Irving/dp/0345449347 (2288 words)

	The Fourth Hand by John Irving \| Extracts \| Guardian Unlimited Books
		Excerpted from The Fourth Hand by John Irving.
		Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event - the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age.
		Now Wallingford's ex-wife - her name was Marilyn - was wont to say that she wished her ex-husband had lost more than his left hand.
	books.guardian.co.uk /extracts/story/0,,517185,00.html (2280 words)

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