Lies that preoccupy, obsess, and eventually distort inform Alberts’s (The Price of Land in Shelby, 1996, etc.) tale of a mother and her daughter. Allie, the week before the birthday of Lila, the infant she gave up for adoption two decades ago, is staying in a Buddhist center in New Mexico. She’s not far from Albuquerque, where Lila first entered the world, and she’s preparing an account of her life for this daughter, just in case Lila shows up looking for her mother when the adoption records are unsealed. As for Lila in actuality (her story is told alternately with her mother’s), she’s now a student in Boston and pregnant herself—although unsure of who the father is: it could be dependable Kevin, Harvard law student, or it could be a married professor with whom she had a brief affair. So, as Lila prepares for an abortion and a cross-country drive to Colorado, where her adoptive parents are living, she revisits her own personal history. Both mother and daughter, as it happens, have survived troubled childhoods. Allie’s Jewish family hoarded painful secrets: her grandfather committed suicide, her mother was frequently depressed, her father was often violent. In adolescence, she herself turned reclusive and anorexic. For her part, Lila always felt uncomfortably different from her adoptive parents; she was a military brat, on to of it, and the constant moving about only increased her sense of alienation. Her parents have been good to her, but she still finds the
Pub Date: March 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-87451-898-9
Page Count: 220
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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