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PILLOWS FOR YOUR PRISON CELL

A deftly told tale about breaking free from the yoke of voracious and unsustainable, media-driven consumerism.

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A fable of desire and of freeing oneself from its chains.

First-time author Bullard relates the tale of a young boy, Amir, in an unnamed land. Amir’s father dreams of lifting the family out of poverty and buying a farm in the country but dies in an accident, sinking the family into penury. One day at the local market, Amir and his younger brother, Mamluk, steal a chicken to feed the family. The authorities apprehend the brothers, and a judge sentences them to the Mill, a notorious labor camp from which no one returns. Prison guards separate the brothers. Subsisting on gruel, Amir spends his days in a bare cell physically powering a contraption running unseen machinery that grinds grain—a benefit to society and the route to his freedom, his captors tell him. Soon, the guards bring a pillow to Amir, calling it a gift. They follow with more: a blanket, a mat and a bowl of his mother’s lamb stew. Amir accepts these so-called gifts but eventually realizes that they come with price tags—literally, on obscure labels that add weeks and months to his sentence. The spirit of his dead father counsels him that “the desire for more is insatiable” and that to find true freedom, release and happiness, “You must grow your Self-Control…and kill Indulgences and Fantasies.” Eventually, young Amir musters the willpower to renounce the gifts, realizing that “the more stuff I get, the less of me there is” and that seeming luxuries are really “millstones” keeping him in the Mill. Written in a deceptively simple fashion, this fable will intrigue anyone spinning on an economic hamster wheel of work, debt, and questions about the spiritual and environmental dissolution of a modern world hellbent on a dead-end street of rampant consumerism. On the most basic level, it makes entertaining reading, but it works on a higher plane, and for those possessed by their possessions, it gives a path to the possibility of freedom.

A deftly told tale about breaking free from the yoke of voracious and unsustainable, media-driven consumerism.

Pub Date: May 20, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-9911624-0-6

Page Count: 126

Publisher: Brainsquall

Review Posted Online: April 25, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014

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THE ALCHEMIST

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind. 

 The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility. 

 Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

Pub Date: July 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-06-250217-4

Page Count: 192

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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