A fine, quiet, and rewarding portrait, written in fluid verse that is both unobtrusive and elegant.
Novelist/poet Leithauser (A Few Corrections, 2001, etc.) himself admits that this one is long for a poem but short for a novel. Still, it’s a pleasant hybrid no matter how you look at it.
Russel Darlington is one of those intrepid early-modern souls whose faith in science and dedication to human progress helps set the course of the 20th century, for better and for worse. Born in 1888 in Storey, Indiana, Darlington is the son of a wealthy merchant and loses his mother while still a young boy. Fascinated by insects, lizards, and snakes, he becomes a passionate student of biology and many years later is appointed professor of entomology at Old U., his alma mater. Though bookish and shy by nature, he manages to win the heart of Pauline Beaudette, an Old U. classmate from St. Louis, whom he marries against his father’s better wishes. It’s an unhappy union almost from the start: Pauline finds Darlington’s scientific pursuits boring, and she’s bitterly disappointed, as well, in her failure to conceive a child. The two divorce, and Pauline eventually goes mad. Darlington immerses himself in his work, setting off on a long expedition to study butterflies on the tiny Pacific island of Malaya, where he nearly dies after falling from a cliff. He recuperates in the US, resumes his university career, and (with the fortune he inherits from his father) founds a natural history museum. Solitary in his habits and highly focused on his work, he is content to live as a single man—until he falls in love with Marja Szumski, the 21-year-old daughter of his housekeeper.
A fine, quiet, and rewarding portrait, written in fluid verse that is both unobtrusive and elegant.Pub Date: March 27, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41148-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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