A nice portrait of an interesting (and underappreciated) time and place.
An elegant and thoughtful historical set in 17th-century Maryland.
The Chesapeake State had one of the most colorful and turbulent histories of the original 13 colonies. Settled in 1634 by Lord Baltimore, it was originally intended as a haven for Catholics fleeing persecution in England, and a large proportion of its founding fathers were Catholic aristocrats and Jesuit missionaries. The first colony to permit the free exercise of religion, it inspired resentment among its (Protestant) neighbors and was invaded by Puritans, who expelled the Jesuits and forbade Catholicism. Karlin, whose sixth novel this is (Prisoners, 1998, etc.), presents a fairly large cast, but it’s representative: the adventurer James Hallam (by turns mercenary, carpenter, indentured servant, and aspiring politician); the black slave Ezekiel (born in Dahomey and transported to Barbados, where he spares his master’s life in a slave uprising and is forced to flee for his own); the Piscataway Indian Tawzin (kidnapped as a child and carried away to England, where he is baptized as John Christman and later returns to Maryland a devout Catholic); the Jesuit scholar and missionary Father White (exhausted from years of religious exile from his native England); the Jewish trader Jacob Lambroso (a friend of Tawzin and Ezekiel), and, in the background, the large and influential Calvert family (founders and first governors of the colony). Although larger historical currents are present, this is a story of private lives first, focussing on the tribulations of the individual characters (as when Tawzin is falsely accused of abducting his own wife and brought to trial), and it succeeds admirably in making their lives credible and interesting. While, particularly in Ezekiel’s sections (“I thought then that Tawzin loved Lombroso as a wise son does who forgives his father for seeing a dream in his son’s fallible flesh and forming spirit”), the language can be overblown, for the most part it’s quite readable.
A nice portrait of an interesting (and underappreciated) time and place.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-880684-89-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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