bookshelf

THE CLIMATE OF THE COUNTRY

Name: THE CLIMATE OF THE COUNTRY
Author: Marnie Mueller
ISBN: 1-880684-58-6

by Marnie Mueller Marnie Mueller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1999

None

bookshelf

Life in the wartime Tule Lake Japanese American Segregation Camp, in a nuanced yet strangely unaffecting tale of a pacifist’s struggle to reconcile his beliefs with the camp militants’ violent behavior. Mueller (Green Fires, 1994) was herself born in Tule Camp, where her parents carried on lives not dissimilar to those of protagonists Esther and Denton Jordan and their three-year-old daughter, Parin. Here, she ably evokes the locale’s bleak prairie setting and the cramped living quarters of both the resident Japanese and the Americans—but this isn—t enough to make Denton the complex man that he should be. Instead, as Mueller tells the story of his struggle to maintain the prosperous Japanese-run cooperative he’s established, and his efforts to deal with his Jewish in-laws (not sympathetic to his pacifism), Denton comes across as terminally smug. Though Esther remains loyal, his obsessive commitment to his work wears her down, as do the camp’s isolation and growing divisiveness. When the US Army takes over the camp, young Japanese militants begin a campaign of violence and confrontation that threatens not only to compromise Denton’s ideals but to undo all his hard work. A group assaults him; Tokura Honda, who runs the cooperative, is murdered; and Denton feels both sides” distrust intensifying. While Esther visits her family in San Francisco, he begins a highly charged affair with a nurse. And though he’s tempted to join the army, his principles will win out. Which is fine, though somehow not all that moving. Mueller grapples, often admirably, with complex subjects . . . but never quite masters them.

None None

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999

ISBN: 1-880684-58-6

Page Count: 305

Publisher: Curbstone Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SHOWGIRL AND THE WRITER
by Marnie Mueller Marnie Mueller

- BOOK REVIEW
MY MOTHER’S ISLAND
by Marnie Mueller Marnie Mueller

- BOOK REVIEW
GREEN FIRES
by Marnie Mueller Marnie Mueller

bookshelf

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

bookshelf

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Film Productions Halted Due to Coronavirus Worry

- SEEN & HEARD
‘The Nightingale’ Is Reese’s Book Club Pick

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Adaptation of ‘The Nightingale’ Coming in 2027

bookshelf

THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

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

bookshelf

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.