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THE CLIMATE OF THE COUNTRY

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

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

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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.

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
MY MOTHER’S ISLAND
by Marnie Mueller

- BOOK REVIEW
GREEN FIRES
by Marnie Mueller

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.