More pleasures here from the novel’s moral clarity than from those traditional sources, plot and character.
How do you prepare for death? With bare feet and a head full of precepts, if you’re the protagonist of Brewer’s didactic first outing.
After learning he’s terminally ill with tuberculosis, the first thing Henry Stuart does is discard his boots. His sudden contact with the earth is restorative. And the 67-year-old retired professor will make many more changes to his life in Nampa, Idaho (the year is 1925). Strongly influenced by Tolstoy, he’ll give up his house and land to his two sons. He’ll move to Fairhope, Alabama, a “reform community” opposed to rampant capitalism. There, on cliffs above Mobile Bay, he will build a round hut out of concrete (Stuart did exist, and the hut still does; Fairhope is Brewer’s hometown), following a vision that comes to him in a dream about a bird’s nest and Black Elk. Henry’s ideas are a synthesis of Tolstoy, Thoreau, and the Oglala Sioux medicine man. He’s convinced he can overcome fear of death by moving from a material to a spiritual plane, while the challenge of manual work, done by himself alone, will be “soul-perfecting.” In fact, he’s a set of quirks and ideals who stops just short of being a fully realized fictional character. His moral evolution is the thing, and so his family relationships go unexplored. Does he even like the sons he left behind? To his kindly Alabama neighbors, he sometimes seems just crabby. Brewer’s account of the hut construction is plodding (Masonry 101), but he does enliven his austere tale with two hurricanes and a near-fatal moccasin attack. Then, in the midst of the second hurricane, Henry has a road-to-Damascus epiphany: He will not die anytime soon, but must reach out to others.
More pleasures here from the novel’s moral clarity than from those traditional sources, plot and character.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-47631-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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