Overall: thin, despite good local color.
Evocative scenes of Depression-era Colorado, with a low-wattage plot and unconvincing characters.
Screenwriter and second-novelist Wright (Easy Money, 1995) nicely details life on the plains, where drought and wind have take away the topsoil, and loneliness and hardship are constant for struggling farmers and their wives. Newly married to Alfred Bowen, Virginia was raised as a Quaker and is working for the Quakers when she meets Alfred in Mexico, where he has a job with the YMCA, though already decided to return home and farm: not to the lush family ranch on the well-watered mountain slopes, where his mother and father still live, but to a piece of treeless land to the east. The couple, who’ve met only twice but fall in love through letters, decide to marry, and Virginia comes out to Denver for the ceremony. At 34, she hasn’t expected to marry, and, though she’s deeply in love with Alfred, she has some hurts to bear—she’s been told she can’t have children—and certain secrets that give her shame. Alfred is also troubled by his past. Believing that his father despised him and preferred his elder brother, Samuel, who died in an accident, Alfred refuses to ask him for help, an attitude that nearly ruins him when low prices, drought, and a hard winter threaten ruin. As Virginia tries to adjust to farm life, she recalls her earlier years and regrets that she can’t have a child to end her isolation. Nothing goes well, and life gets even more complicated when Virginia discovers she actually is pregnant. They impulsively ask her brother, Jonathan, a shell-shocked veteran of WWI, to come to help them. Though a whiz with animals, Jonathan is entirely unpredictable and causes nothing but trouble. He forgets his chores and manages to get Ida, a local mentally disabled laundry woman, pregnant, as the farm falls on even harder times. Some unexpected if schematic solutions do appear.
Overall: thin, despite good local color.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3020-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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