A splendid, relentlessly suspenseful fictional examination of centuries of cruelty, frustration, and disasters, both natural...
Astonishingly accomplished debut pits a fiercely independent, emotionally scarred descendant of rapacious Oregon ranchers against members of the Nez Perce Indian tribe—in a courtroom battle for the ownership of land that is sacred to both.
On the same day that her mother dies of a lingering brain cancer, Iris Steele gets a registered letter informing her she's being sued by members of the Nez Perce over the ownership of a portion of her family's cattle ranch known to both her family, and the Indians, as the Heart of the Beast. After burying her mother in the family plot that holds her father and brother, Iris, 28, stoically brings in the wheat crop, but can't suppress memories of her horrifically dysfunctional family. Haunted by her emotionally abusive mother Elise, her brutally sadistic father Ike, her sensitive but doomed brother Jake, she finds herself unburdening her grief to 70-year-old Aunt Hanna, who emerges from a 30-year stay in an insane asylum to complete a series of sculptures of the family. Iris toys with giving up the ranch since, with the rare exception of the love and loss of her brother's best friend Henry, ranching has been for her an almost unending history of terrifying violence (a scene in which a harvesting combine explodes and turns wheat fields into a raging holocaust is a masterpiece of edge-of-the-seat action prose) and exploitation going all the way back to her Norwegian pioneer ancestors. She decides to fight for the land, though, because events, within her family, and in the larger history of the region, suggest that the crimes and rapacity isolating whites from Indians are not as clearly drawn as both sides would want to admit. As Hanna completes her sculptures and the courtroom confrontation wounds everyone, Iris resolves her traumatic past in a single, selfless act.
A splendid, relentlessly suspenseful fictional examination of centuries of cruelty, frustration, and disasters, both natural and man-made, played out against a pitiless, magnificently dangerous northwestern landscape.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1179-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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