A haunting captor/prisoner love story set during the Japanese occupation of China, by the author of the story collection The Light of Home (1992). The year is 1938. Captain Kuroda is a reluctant and unskilled Japanese officer, a botanist by training, tormented by memories of the Nanking massacre: the squeals of children being killed, the smell of burning flesh, the dismembered bodies, the sight of a pregnant woman bayoneted in the abdomen, the ``constant rape.'' His army has moved on, leaving him the commander of a small garrison in the rolling hills of east-central China. When he comes upon his soldiers raping a filthy and starving woman, he intervenes for reasons he doesn't fully understand, and takes her under his protection. The daughter of a doctor, Li speaks Japanese; glad of the warmth of his quarters, she cooks for him but avoids his questions. Slowly, though, communication begins: He shows her a bamboo grove and talks about plants; she suggests that she should be his mistress. Isolated from his peers, Kuroda is renewed by this woman who seems to enjoy making love to him; she responds to how much he needs her and senses in him a trustworthiness in a world bereft of trust. As the lovers each realize the impossibility of a future, their attachment intensifies. Stabbed and dying, Kuroda tells of the horrors he's witnessed; Li holds him in her arms: ``I said he could forget it now, that I would remember.'' Using spare, unadorned prose, Binstock manages evocatively to juxtapose the occupying army's totalitarian cosmos, predicated on murder, rape, and the absolute lack of safety, with the tender realm temporarily created by these two damaged but deep-feeling lovers. A first novel unrelenting in its rendition of wartime cruelty, but tempered with a bracing reminder that deep human feelings can and will sprout from scorched earth.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-56947-038-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
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.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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