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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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