A deftly told tale about breaking free from the yoke of voracious and unsustainable, media-driven consumerism.
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
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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