A well-told story, crisp with particulars, of the fundamental engagement of a Western family with the lives of ordinary...
A son strives to understand his father, an iconoclastic Methodist missionary to India during the ’20s and ’30s.
Williams’ father, Fred, arrived in India in 1921 as part of the Methodist ministry. He was, from the start, called “to help meet people’s mundane human needs down here on planet Earth,” writes Williams in an easeful, searching voice. Fred understood the evangelical aspects of his mission–to convert as many Hindus to Christianity as he could–but this soon lost any meaning when it failed to address urgent, everyday concerns. He was drawn to the philosophical, political and cross-cultural issues that roiled India during these pre-independence days, and Williams evokes them all with bite and immediacy. There, on the plains of Bengal, Fred partook in an experiment in rural education, cutting like a torch through the Hindu caste system, convincing his students to appreciate the dignity of labor–in that anything removing us from our work, removes us from our lives–inhabiting elegant, appropriate mud houses and making good use of the glories of a sanitation system. Proselytizing took a back seat to encouraging self-government, countering conditions that led to disease, poking moneylenders in the eye and curbing population growth. There was an enormous need to handle infant and female health care, which Williams found of greater value than “foisting one’s religion on others.” None of this, Williams admits, exempts his parents from ingrained colonial superiorities. Still, they were ready to relinquish their Western lifestyle and embrace the clothing and food of their neighbors, and their desire for independence. Everything would come to a head in India with Gandhi–the challenge to tradition and custom, undermining the hierarchy of class that suffocated independence. Williams’ parents, who forged a friendship with the iconic leader, joined the fray, offering practical advice in place of tallying another Christian.
A well-told story, crisp with particulars, of the fundamental engagement of a Western family with the lives of ordinary Indians during a pivotal moment in history.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1936
ISBN: 978-0-595-46500-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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