Dispassionately explores how various Eastern disciplines can intersect and overlap.
In the first decades of the 20th century, an Okinawan girl learns what she needs to fulfill her destiny as a High Born One and become a Bodhisattva.
Sankey’s debut novel appears to be the middle volume of a projected trilogy. This volume takes place from 1902 to 1917 in a small village in the north of Okinawa, where Mahataa is born into a family that is financially poor but spiritually rich. At her birth, she makes an extraordinary cry that signals her high spiritual destiny; however, she must be trained carefully to fulfill it. Mahataa learns her family lore from her great-grandmother Hanaa, who is a shamanic storyteller, and is trained in meditation and tai chi by an old Taoist monk; in her native religion by the spirit of the Noro, or High Priestess, who possesses a local woman to transmit her knowledge; in prophecy and the use of the I Ching by the Yuta, or local soothsayer (a role that, at that time, was outlawed by the Japanese government); and in herbal medicine and acupuncture by the Yabuu, or medicine woman. Meanwhile, her best friend, a boy named En, is on his own spiritual path, which includes an episode of disappearance into another world under the influence of a mysterious scroll that Hanaa had left in Mahataa’s care. This is, essentially, a didactic book, presenting the essence of everything that Mahataa learns as she learns it; it’s something of a drawback for a novel when the main character’s life path is to detach herself from the kind of emotional drama that constitutes the basis of traditional Western plots. One cannot help but suspect that the first volume, in which Mahataa, in a previous life, commits the kinds of karmic sins that she has overcome in intervening lives, and the final one, in which she uses what she learns here in a later life, will be more exciting.
Dispassionately explores how various Eastern disciplines can intersect and overlap.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461168799
Page Count: 306
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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