The second installment in one of the most deeply curious works of modern fiction: a romantic celebration of the South in the period leading up to the Civil War, by an acclaimed American writer who has spent most of his life living abroad. Green, born in Paris in 1900, grew up listening to the tales of the Old South told by his mother, raised in Virginia. During his long and prolific career, he has published a number of powerful, somber novels, plays, and a series of acclaimed memoirs and diaries. But he never forgot his mother's stories of an elegant, untroubled life in the Old South. The first volume in the ongoing series, The Distant Lands (1991), was published in France in the 1980s and became a phenomenal bestseller. His protagonist, Elizabeth Escridge, is a beautiful, willful, deeply romantic Englishwoman. The story followed the adolescent Elizabeth's rather complex romantic entanglements, centered around a Georgia plantation, and culminating in a duel in which her former lover and her husband kill each other. Now, Green traces her still tempestuous life in the years leading up to the outbreak of war, as she attempts to conform to the intricacies of high-society life in Savannah, raise her son, unravel some family mysteries, and resist the romantic advances of various dashing gentlemen. She marries a cousin, only to lose him in the war's first major battle. Despite the overheated drama, this is no Gone With the Wind: Green can write, and he knows how to set a large, shrewdly detailed cast in motion. The gothic plot (of betrayals, frustrated loves, grim secrets) is lively and inventive. But this is a world without larger moral dimensions: Slavery is kept largely offstage, and Green, sadly, really does seem to believe, as the narrative notes, that the gentlemanly, put-upon South was merely ``defending its lands'' in a war that took 600,000 lives. A troubling, oddly outdated work.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1996
ISBN: 0-7145-2985-0
Page Count: 651
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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