In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, longtime New Orleans residents Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun
are cast into an unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and
water. In the days after the storm, Abdulrahman traveled the flooded
streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he
could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared-- arrested and accused of being an agent of al Qaeda.
Reviews:
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Eggers burst onto the scene in 2000
with his hugely successful memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius. Unlike many memoirists, he has resisted the temptation to parcel
out the unpublished parts of his life into yet more memoirs. Instead,
in his most compelling works since his debut, he has told the stories of
others. What Is the What (2006) explored, in novel form, the ordeals of
Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese "lost boy," and now Eggers chronicles,
as nonfiction, the tribulations of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian
American painting contractor who decides to ride out Hurricane Katrina
in New Orleans. Although his wife, Kathy, leaves town with their four
children, Abdulrahman (known as Zeitoun because few locals can pronounce
his first name) stays behind, hoping to protect their home, their job
sites, and their rental properties. After the storm, he paddles the
flooded streets in a canoe, rescuing stranded people, feeding trapped
dogs, and marveling at the sometimes surreal beauty of the devastation.
Was it God's plan that he help others? he wonders. Then people in
uniforms take him at gunpoint and incarcerate him. There are no charges,
only the guards' insistence that he is "al Qaeda" and "Taliban."
Zeitoun's odyssey—23 days of grueling imprisonment, held incommunicado
and deprived of all due process—is but one nightmare of many lived after
Katrina. But it is exceptionally well told: here, as in What Is the
What, Eggers employs a poetic, declarative style, shaping the narrative
with subtlety and grace. More importantly, it is exceptionally well
chosen. In the wake of disaster, we often cling to stories reassuring us
that we respond to trials heroically. But Zeitoun reminds us that we
are just as capable of responding to fear fearfully, forgetting the very
things we claim to value most. Heartbreaking and haunting. Copyright
2010 Booklist Reviews.
In the 1970's, a group of idealists set out to live off the land. They find themselves living in a decrepit mansion called Arcadia House and the land surrounding it. Handy, a musician and the group's leader; Astrid, a midwife; Abe, a master carpenter; Hannah, a baker and historian; and Abe and Hannah's only child Bit, who is born soon after the commune is created are the main characters in the book. While Arcadia rises and falls, Bit, too, ages and changes. Can he remain connected to the peaceful homestead life of Arcadia and its inhabitants and yet become his own man, venturing out into the world he must learn to live in?
/* Starred Review */ This beautifully crafted novel
follows Bit Stone, the first child to be born in the late 1960s on an
upstate New York commune called Arcadia, from childhood through the year
2018. An introspective youngster who can often go months without
speaking, Bit “watches life from a distance.” He can see how hard his
parents work to make Arcadia successful, but he can also see that the
self-indulgent commune leader frequently fails to live up to his own
ideals. As the backbreaking work, continual poverty, and near-constant
hunger work to undermine the once-flourishing sense of community, Bit’s
family leaves the commune to make their way in the outside world. Bit
becomes a photographer and teacher but is always anchored to the place
of his childhood, even marrying the emotionally damaged daughter of
Arcadia’s guru, but happiness proves elusive, both for him and for the
greater world, as a flu pandemic sweeps the globe. Groff’s second novel,
after the well-received The Monsters of Templeton (2008), gives full
rein to her formidable descriptive powers, as she summons both the
beauty of striving for perfection and the inevitable devastation of
failing so miserably to achieve it. -- Wilkinson, Joanne (Reviewed
01-01-2012) (Booklist, vol 108, number 9, p35)
Publishers Weekly:
/* Starred Review */ Groff’s dark, lyrical examination
of life on a commune follows Bit, aka Little Bit, aka Ridley Sorrel
Stone, born in the late ’60s in a spot that will become Arcadia, a
utopian community his parents help to form. Despite their idealistic
goals, the family’s attempts at sustainability bring hunger, cold,
illness, and injury. Bit’s vibrant mother retreats into herself each
winter; caring for the community literally breaks his father’s back. The
small, sensitive child whose purposeful lack of speech is sometimes
mistaken for slowness finds comfort in Grimms’ fairy tales and is lost
in the outside world once Arcadia’s increasingly entitled spiritual
leader falls from grace and the community crumbles. Split between utopia
and its aftermath, the book’s second half tracks the ways in which Bit,
now an adult (he’s 50 when this all ends, in 2018), has been shaped by
Arcadia; a career in photography was the perfect choice for a man who
“watches life from a good distance.” Bit’s painful experiences as a
husband, father, and son grow more harrowing as humanity becomes
increasingly imperiled. The effective juxtaposition of past and future
and Groff’s (Delicate Edible Birds) beautiful prose make this an
unforgettable read. Agent: William Morris Endeavor. (Mar.) --Staff
(Reviewed November 21, 2011) (Publishers Weekly, vol 258, issue 47, p)
Library Journal:
/* Starred Review */ Bit Stone was born in the early
1960s to a devoted couple living in a secluded hippie commune in western
New York. He was a mostly happy boy, if quietly unnerved (his mother
struggles with seasonal depression), who loves Arcadia and his parents
and all the people there who lead hard, pure lives, living off the land.
His parents, Hannah and Adam, are at the center of the loose Arcadia
administration whose acknowledged leader, Handy, increasingly butts
heads with Adam. It is no surprise that as the population of Arcadia
grows and drugs become more prevalent, the community, set upon by
political events that move the narrative into the near future, falls
apart. Bit and the other core members go out into the real world with a
wildly fluctuating level of success. VERDICT Groff, author of 2008's
magnificent The Monsters of Templeton , eschews counterculture
stereotypes to bring Bit's interior and exterior worlds to life. Her
exquisite writing makes the reader question whether to hurry up to read
the next beautiful sentence or slow down and savor each passage. Highly
recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 9/19/11.]— Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor
Dist. Lib., MI --Beth E. Andersen (Reviewed December 1, 2011) (Library
Journal, vol 136, issue 20, p114)
Kirkus:
/* Starred Review */ An astonishing novel, both in
ambition and achievement, filled with revelations that appear inevitable
in retrospect, amid the cycle of life and death. As a follow-up to
Groff's well-received debut (The Monsters of Templeton, 2008), this
novel is a structural conundrum, ending in a very different place than
it begins while returning full circle. At the outset, it appears to be a
novel of the Utopian, communal 1960s, of a charismatic leader, possibly
a charlatan, and an Arcadia that grows according to his belief that
"the Universe will provide." It concludes a half-century later in a
futuristic apocalypse of worldwide plague and quarantine. To reveal too
much of what transpires in between would undermine the reader's rich
experience of discovery: "The page of a book can stay cohesive in the
eyes: one sentence can lead to the next. He can crack a paragraph and
eat it. Now a story. Now a novel, one full life enclosed in covers." The
"he" is Bit Stone, introduced as a 5-year-old child of that commune,
and it is his life that is enclosed in these covers. Following a brief
prologue, representing a pre-natal memory, the novel comprises four
parts, with leaps of a decade or more between them, leaving memory and
conjecture to fill in the blanks. At an exhibition of Bit's photography,
a passion since his childhood (documented in some shots), those who had
known him all his life realized, "What they found most moving, they
told him later, were the blanks between the frames, the leaps that
happened invisibly between the then and the now." The cumulative impact
of this novel is similar, as the boy leaps from the commune and
subsequently his parents, becomes a parent himself, deals with the
decline of his parents and finds his perspective both constant and
constantly changing: "He can't understand what the once-upon-a-time Bit
is saying to the current version of himself or to the one who will stand
here in the future...worn a little more by time and loss." A novel of
"the invisible tissue of civilization," of "community or freedom," and
of the precious fragility of lives in the balance.(Kirkus Reviews,
January 15, 2012)
Biography of Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia
Lauren Groff was born in 1978 in
Cooperstown, N.Y. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Her short stories have appeared in a
number of journals, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic
Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Subtropics,
and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories 2007 and Best
American Short Stories 2010, Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best
New American Voices 2008. A story will be included in the 2012 edition
of PEN/ O. Henry Prize Stories.
She was awarded the Axton Fellowship
in Fiction at the University of Louisville, and has had residencies and
fellowships at Yaddo, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Vermont Studio Center
and Ragdale.
Lauren's first novel, The
Monsters of Templeton, published in February 2008, was a New York Times
Editors’ Choice selection and bestseller and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize
for New Writers. Her second book, Delicate Edible Birds, is a
collection of stories. Her second novel, Arcadia, was published in March
2012.
She lives in Gainesville, Florida
with her husband and two sons.
Selected for a jury that must choose an appropriate memorial for September 11 victims, Claire Burwell struggles to navigate a media firestorm when the winning designer is revealed as an enigmatic Muslim-American.
Amy Waldman was a reporter for The New York Times for eight years, including three as co-chief of the New Delhi bureau. She was also a national correspondent for the Atlantic. The Submission is her debut novel and was named a New York Times Notable Book for 2011, one of NPR's Ten Best Novels, Esquire's Book of the Year, Entertainment Weekly's #1 Novel for the Year, a Washington Post Notable Fiction Book, and one of Amazon's Top 100 Books and top ten debut fiction. It was a finalist for the Guardian (UK) First Book Award. Waldman's fiction has appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Review and the Financial Times, and was anthologized in "The Best American Non-Required Reading 2010."
Waldman graduated from Yale University and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and at the American Academy in Berlin. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.
/* Starred Review */ After venomous deliberations over anonymous design submissions for a 9/11 memorial at ground zero, the jury selects an elegant garden as the ideal embodiment of remembrance and rebirth. But when the identity of the architect is revealed—Mohammad Khan, the American son of Muslim immigrants from India—the dream of national healing warps into a hysterical nightmare. As public outrage ignites, entangled characters struggle with anger, fear, conscience, and ambition. Mohammad, called Mo, is stubborn and aloof. Journalist Alyssa is desperate to capitalize on the excoriating scandal. Down-and-out Sean, who lost his firefighter brother, flounders as spokesperson for the victims’ families, while two young 9/11 widows—Claire, wealthy and glamorous, and Asma, an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh—push through grief to try to do the right thing. In her magnetizing first novel, replete with searing insights and exquisite metaphors, Waldman, formerly a New York Times reporter and co-chief of the South Asia bureau, maps shadowy psychological terrain and a vast social minefield as conflicted men and women confront life-and-death moral quandaries within the glare and din of a media carnival. Waldman brilliantly delineates the legacy of 9/11; the confluence of art, religion, and politics; the plexus between the individual and the group; and the glory of transcendent empathy in The Bonfire of the Vanities for our time. -- Seaman, Donna (Reviewed 07-01-2011) (Booklist /* Starred Review */ After venomous deliberations over anonymous design submissions for a 9/11 memorial at ground zero, the jury selects an elegant garden as the ideal embodiment of remembrance and rebirth. But when the identity of the architect is revealed—Mohammad Khan, the American son of Muslim immigrants from India—the dream of national healing warps into a hysterical nightmare. As public outrage ignites, entangled characters struggle with anger, fear, conscience, and ambition. Mohammad, called Mo, is stubborn and aloof. Journalist Alyssa is desperate to capitalize on the excoriating scandal. Down-and-out Sean, who lost his firefighter brother, flounders as spokesperson for the victims’ families, while two young 9/11 widows—Claire, wealthy and glamorous, and Asma, an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh—push through grief to try to do the right thing. In her magnetizing first novel, replete with searing insights and exquisite metaphors, Waldman, formerly a New York Times reporter and co-chief of the South Asia bureau, maps shadowy psychological terrain and a vast social minefield as conflicted men and women confront life-and-death moral quandaries within the glare and din of a media carnival. Waldman brilliantly delineates the legacy of 9/11; the confluence of art, religion, and politics; the plexus between the individual and the group; and the glory of transcendent empathy in The Bonfire of the Vanities for our time. -- Seaman, Donna (Reviewed 07-01-2011) (Booklist, vol 107, number 21, p28)
Publishers Weekly:
/* Starred Review */ Waldman imagines a toxic brew of bigotry in conflict with idealism in this frighteningly plausible and tightly wound account of what might happen if a Muslim architect had won a contest to design a memorial at the World Trade Center site. Jury member and 9/11 widow Claire Burwell presses for the winning garden design both before and after its creator is revealed as Mohammed "Mo" Khan, an American-born and raised architect who becomes embroiled in the growing furor between those who see the garden as a symbol of tolerance and peace, and various activists who claim patriotism as they spew anti-Islamic diatribes. Waldman keenly focuses on political and social variables, including an opportunistic governor who abets the outbreak of xenophobia; the wealthy chairman of the contest, maneuvering for social cachet; a group of zealots whose obsession with radical Islam foments violence; a beautiful Iranian-American lawyer who becomes Mo's lover until he refuses to become a mouthpiece; and a trouble-sowing tabloid reporter. Meanwhile, Mo refuses to demean himself by explaining the source of his design, seen by some as an Islamic martyr's paradise. As misguided outrage flows from all corners, Waldman addresses with a refreshing frankness thorny moral questions and ethical ironies without resorting to breathless hyperbole. True, there are more blowhards than heroes, but that just makes it all the more real. (Aug.) --Staff (Reviewed May 23, 2011) (Publishers Weekly, vol 258, issue 21, p)
Library Journal:
/* Starred Review */ After four months of wrangling, the jury commissioned to choose from the 5000 anonymous submissions for New York City's 9/11 memorial acceded to the affecting widow's steely determination. The Garden, entry #4879, would be a place, Claire opined, where families could "stumble on joy." But jury chair Paul Rubin sees his ambitious plans for elite fund-raising soirees evaporate when the architect's name is revealed. Mohammed Khan's Muslim moniker hits the news like an explosion, reopening still raw wounds. The volatile Sean Gallagher of the Memorial Support Committee is apoplectic, politicians pander to their constituents, lawyers salivate at perceived opportunities, and the Muslim American Coordinating Council sees the besieged Mo Khan as a tool to advance its own agenda. Can he be pressured into walking away from his finest artistic achievement? From this cacophony of intolerance, the single voice calling for reason emanates from Asma Anwar, a non-English speaking Bangladeshi widow whose husband also perished in the burning towers. VERDICT Waldman fluidly blends her reporter's skill (New York Times ) at rapid-fire storytelling with a novelist's gift for nuanced characterization. She dares readers to confront their own complicated prejudices steeped in faith, culture, and class. This is an insightful, courageous, heartbreaking work that should be read, discussed, then read again. [See Prepub Alert, 2/7/11.]— Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL --Sally Bissell (Reviewed July 1, 2011) (LibraryJournal, vol 136, issue 12, p75)
/* Starred Review */ The selection of a Muslim architect for a 9/11 memorial stirs a media circus in Waldman's poised and commanding debut novel.The jury assembled to select a design for a memorial in Manhattan represented every important interest group: a 9/11 widow, an art critic, a governor's representative and other major stakeholders. They considered blind submissions before arriving at a garden-themed design. The one contingency they didn't plan for was that the winner would be a Muslim, Mohammad Khan. Though he's not especially religious and his bona fides as an architect are impeccable, Khan still becomes a target for anti-Islam firebrands, and even his defenders are left wringing their hands. Waldman skillfully presents the perspectives of a handful of major characters, including Claire, a 9/11 widow; Sean, a pugnacious victims' activist who lost his brother in the attacks; and Mohammad, who vacillates between gloomy isolation and outspoken defiance at attempts to reject or tweak his design. Waldman shrewdly, subtly reveals the class and race divisions that spark arguments about who "owns" the design; it's no accident that wealthy Claire played a leading role on the jury while Asma, a working-class Bangladeshi woman who lost her husband in the attacks as well, is all but unheard. Waldman, a former NewYork Times reporter, discusses 9/11 victims, memorial gardens and Muslim-American life, but her keenest observations are of the media. She has a canny understanding of how a New York Post front page can stoke right-wing rage, or how a New York Times article can muddy the waters. There's a slight cartoonishness to her characterizations of cub reporters and radio hosts, but overall this is a remarkably assured portrait of how a populace grows maddened and confused when ideology trumps empathy.A stellar debut. Waldman's book reflects a much-needed understanding of American paranoia in the post-9/11 world. (Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2011)
/* Starred Review */ The fourth in the great and undiminished Roth’s recent cycle of short novels follows Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), and The Humbug (2009), and as exceptional as those novels are, this latest in the series far exceeds its predecessors in both emotion and intellect. In general terms, the novel is a staggering visit to a time and place when a monumental health crisis dominated the way people led their day-to-day lives. Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1940s (a common setting for this author) experienced, as the war in Europe was looking better for the Allies, a scare as deadly as warfare. The city has been hit by an epidemic of polio. Of course, at that time, how the disease spread and its cure were unknown. The city is in a panic, with residents so suspicious of other individuals and ethnic groups that emotions quickly escalate into hostility and even rage. Our hero, and he proves truly heroic, is Bucky Canter, playground director in the Jewish neighborhood of Newark. As the summer progresses, Bucky sees more and more of his teenage charges succumb to the disease. When an opportunity presents itself to leave the city for work in a Catskills summer camp, Bucky is torn between personal safety and personal duty. What happens is heartbreaking, but the joy of having met Bucky redeems any residual sadness. -- Hooper, Brad (Reviewed 07-01-2010) (Booklist, vol 106, number 21, p8)
Publishers Weekly:
Roth continues his string of small, anti–Horatio Alger novels (The Humbling; etc.) with this underwhelming account of Bucky Cantor, the young playground director of the Chancellor Avenue playground in 1944 Newark. When a polio outbreak ravages the kids at the playground, Bucky, a hero to the boys, becomes spooked and gives in to the wishes of his fiancée, who wants him to take a job at the Pocono summer camp where she works. But this being a Roth novel, Bucky can't hide from his fate. Fast-forward to 1971, when Arnie Mesnikoff, the subtle narrator and one of the boys from Chancellor, runs into Bucky, now a shambles, and hears the rest of his story of piercing if needless guilt, bad luck, and poor decisions. Unfortunately, Bucky's too simple a character to drive the novel, and the traits that make him a good playground director--not very bright, quite polite, beloved, straight thinking--make him a lackluster protagonist. For Roth, it's surprisingly timid. (Oct.) --Staff (Reviewed August 2, 2010) (Publishers Weekly, vol 257, issue 30, p)
Library Journal:
/* Starred Review */ During the summer of 1944, young men like Bucky Cantor needed good reason not to be fighting overseas. Though he had bad eyesight, was the sole support of his grandmother, and was the best phys ed teacher Newark's Chancellor Avenue School ever saw, Bucky's guilt informed his life that long, hot summer and forever changed its trajectory. With an incredible eye for historical detail, Roth paints a vivid picture of the polio epidemic that hit the Jewish neighborhood of Weequahic on the Fourth of July weekend, pitting ignorance against science, neighbor against neighbor, and fear against common sense. Bucky excels at his job, keeping the kids active and naively believing that he can personally hold the disease at bay. But as one child after another falls ill, he loses faith in God even as he obsesses over the chance to join his girlfriend, Marcia, in the Poconos. VERDICT Roth, one of our greatest American writers, is unrivaled in his mastery at evoking mid-20th-century New Jersey, but it's the thoughtful examination of the toll guilt takes on the psyche, the futility of raging against God or Fate, and the danger of turning blame inward that give this short novel its power. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/10.]— Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib., Ft. Myers, FL --Sally Bissell (Reviewed August 1, 2010) (Library Journal, vol 135, issue 13, p74)
Kirkus:
/* Starred Review */ For those who monitor the growing list of books by Philip Roth, his forthcoming, Nemesis, presents a revelation as startling as the discovery of a planet or the alignment of a new constellation.The top of the list remains reassuringly familiar: "Zuckerman Books" (those featuring Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego), "Roth Books" (another alter ego, "Philip Roth," in a category that includes fiction and nonfiction alike) and "Kepesh Books" (another serial protagonist who may or may not be an alter ego).But then there is an emergent category: "Nemeses: Short Fiction," which encompasses four recent novels, including the new one. What this means to the ardent Roth reader is that three works previously considered unrelated—Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008) and The Humbling (2009), formerly scattered at the list's bottom with some of his earliest efforts as "Other Books," are now connected. And Nemesis provides the key to that connection.A little longer than the other three, Nemesis could be the darkest novel Roth has written and ranks with the most provocative. It's a parable of innocence lost in the author's native Newark, where polio threatens a neighborhood that is already sacrificing young men to World War II. The protagonist is Bucky Cantor, a 23-year-old playground director, who has seen his best friends enlist in the war while he was rejected for poor eyesight.Instead, "Mr. Cantor" (as his charges call him) finds himself facing a more insidious enemy. "No medicine existed to treat the disease and no vaccine to produce immunity...(it) could befall anyone, for no apparent reason," writes Roth. It arrives without warning, and it changes everything. If anything, it was scarier than cancer or AIDS is now.Narrating the story is one of polio's victims, though he barely emerges as a character until the novel's epiphany. Until then, Roth lets the reader wonder how a narrator named only in passing could penetrate the protagonist's mind and relate a series of incidents that the narrator couldn't have witnessed.As Bucky's boys succumb to the disease, temptation lures him from the city to what appears to be a safe oasis, an idyllic summer camp where his girlfriend works. Yet his conscience (already plagued by his 4-F status) pays the price for his escape, an escape that might prove illusory.What is Bucky's nemesis? Maybe polio. Maybe God, "who made the virus," who kills children with "lunatic cruelty." Maybe mortality—death and the decay that precedes it, the ravages of time that distinguish man from God.But maybe Bucky's nemeses include Bucky himself—a layer of meaning that makes this novel something other than another retelling of Job and forces the reader to reconsider the previously published "Nemeses" in fresh light. For it is within these short novels that Roth tackles nothing less than the human condition, which finds its nemesis in the mirror.(Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2010)
Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks came to live on Martha's Vineyard in 2006. In her travels, she ran across a map by the island's native Wampanoag people that marked the birthplace of Caleb, the first Native American to graduate Harvard College in 1665. Her interest piqued, she unearthed his thin history, immersing herself in the records of his tribe, of the white families that settled the island in the 1640's and the 17th-century Harvard.
/* Starred Review */ Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer
Prize for her Civil War novel, March (2006), here imagines the life of
Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, the first Native American to graduate from
Harvard. The story is told by Bethia Mayfield, the daughter of a
preacher who traveled from England to Martha’s Vineyard to try and
“bring Christ to the Indians.” In 1660, when Bethia is 12, the family
takes Caleb, a Wampanoag Indian, into their home to prepare him for
boarding school. Bethia is a bright scholar herself, and though
education for women is discouraged, she absorbs the lessons taught to
Caleb and her brother Makepeace like a sponge. She struggles through the
deaths of her mother, a younger sister, another brother, and her
father. When Caleb and Makepeace are sent to Cambridge, Bethia
accompanies them as an indentured servant to a professor. She marries a
Harvard scholar, journeys with him to Padua, and finally returns to her
beloved island. In flashbacks, Brooks relates the woes of the Indian
Wars, the smallpox epidemic, and Caleb’s untimely death shortly after
his graduation with honors. Brooks has an uncanny ability to reconstruct
each moment of the history she so thoroughly researched in stunningly
lyrical prose, and her characters are to be cherished. -- Donovan,
Deborah (Reviewed 03-15-2011) (Booklist, vol 107, number 14, p27)
Publishers Weekly:
Pulitzer Prize–winner Brooks (for March) delivers a
splendid historical inspired by Caleb Cheeshahteaumauck, the first
Native American to graduate from Harvard. Brooks brings the 1660s to
life with evocative period detail, intriguing characters, and a
compelling story narrated by Bethia Mayfield, the outspoken daughter of a
Calvinist preacher. While exploring the island now known as Martha's
Vineyard, Bethia meets Caleb, a Wampanoag native to the island, and they
become close, clandestine friends. After Caleb loses most of his family
to smallpox, he begins to study under the tutelage of Bethia's father.
Since Bethia isn't allowed to pursue education herself, she eavesdrops
on Caleb's and her own brother's lessons. Caleb is a gifted scholar who
eventually travels, along with Bethia's brother, to Cambridge to
continue his education. Bethia tags along and her descriptions of
17th-century Cambridge and Harvard are as entertaining as they are
enlightening (Harvard was founded by Puritans to educate the "English
and Indian youth of this country," for instance). With Harvard expected
to graduate a second Martha's Vineyard Wampanoag Indian this year,
almost three and a half centuries after Caleb, the novel's publication
is particularly timely. (May) --Staff (Reviewed March 14, 2011)
(Publishers Weekly, vol 258, issue 11, p)
Library Journal:
/* Starred Review */ In 1965, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck of
Martha's Vineyard graduated from Harvard, whose 1650 charter describes
its mission as "the education of the English and Indian youth of this
country." That much is fact. That Caleb befriended Bethia Mayfield, the
free-spirited daughter of the island's preacher, is of course
fiction—but it's luscious fiction in the capable hands of Pulitzer Prize
winner Brooks (March ). As one might expect from Brooks, Bethia is a
keen and rebellious lass, indignant that she should be kept from book
learning when her slower brother gets the benefit of an education. She
first encounters Caleb in the woods, learning his language and ways
while stoutly arguing her Christian beliefs; later, Bethia's zealous
father brings Caleb into the household to convert him. And so begins
Caleb's crossing, first from Native to English Colonial culture and then
from the island to Cambridge, where he studies at a preparatory school
before entering Harvard. Bethia ends up at the school, too—but as an
indentured servant. VERDICT Writing in Bethia's voice, Brooks offers a
lyric and elevated narrative that effectively replicates the language of
the era; she takes on the obvious issues of white arrogance, cultural
difference, and the debased role of women without settling into
jeremiad. The result is sweet and aching. Highly recommended. [Prepub
Alert, 11/15/10.]— Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal --Barbara Hoffert
(Reviewed March 15, 2011) (Library Journal, vol 136, issue 5, p106)
Kirkus:
(The following is a combined review for CALEB'
and S CROSSING)The NBA-winning Australian-born, now New England author
(People of the Book, 2008,? etc.) moves ever deeper into the American
past.Her fourth novel's announced subject is the eponymous Caleb
Cheeshahteaumauk, a member of the Wampanoag Indian tribe that inhabits
Massachusetts's Great Harbor (a part of Martha's Vineyard), and the
first Native American who will graduate from Harvard College (in 1665).
Even as a boy, Caleb is a paragon of sharp intelligence, proud bearing
and manly charm, as we learn from the somewhat breathless testimony of
Bethia Mayfield, who grows up in Great Harbor where her father, a
compassionate and unprejudiced preacher, oversees friendly relations
between white settlers and the placid Wampanoag. The story Bethia
unfolds is a compelling one, focused primarily on her own experiences as
an indentured servant to a schoolmaster who prepares promising students
for Harvard; a tense relationship with her priggish, inflexible elder
brother Makepeace; and her emotional bond of friendship with the
occasionally distant and suspicious Caleb, who, in this novel's most
serious misstep, isn't really the subject of his own story. Fascinating
period details and a steadily expanding plot, which eventually
encompasses King Philip's War, inevitable tensions between Puritan
whites and upwardly mobile "salvages," as well as the compromises
unavoidably ahead for Bethia, help to modulate a narrative voice that
sometimes teeters too uncomfortably close to romantic clich??. Both
Bethia, whose womanhood precludes her right to seek formal education,
and the stoical Caleb are very nearly too good to be true. However,
Brooks' knowledgeable command of the energies and conflicts of the
period, and particularly her descriptions of the reverence for learning
that animates the little world of Harvard and attracts her characters'
keenest longings, carries a persuasive and quite moving emotional
charge.While no masterpiece, this work nevertheless contributes in good
measure to the current and very welcome revitalization of the historical
novel.(Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2011)
Discussion leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman
Monday, April 23, 1 p.m.
Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, A Tale of Love and Darkness is at once a family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history.
/* Starred Review */ This memoir/family history brims over with riches: metaphors and poetry, drama and comedy, failure and success, unhappy marriages and a wealth of idiosyncratic characters. Some are lions of the Zionist movement—David Ben-Gurion (before whom a young Oz made a terrifying command appearance), novelist S.Y. Agnon, poet Saul Tchernikhovsky—others just neighbors and family friends, all painted lovingly and with humor. Though set mostly during the author's childhood in Jerusalem of the 1940s and '50s, the tale is epic in scope, following his ancestors back to Odessa and to Rovno in 19th-century Ukraine, and describing the anti-Semitism and Zionist passions that drove them with their families to Palestine in the early 1930s. In a rough, dusty, lower-middle-class suburb of Jerusalem, both of Oz's parents found mainly disappointment: his father, a scholar, failed to attain the academic distinction of his uncle, the noted historian Joseph Klausner. Oz's beautiful, tender mother, after a long depresson, committed suicide when Oz (born in 1939) was 12. By the age of 14, Oz was ready to flee his book-crammed, dreary, claustrophobic flat for the freedom and outdoor life of Kibbutz Hulda. Oz's personal trajectory is set against the background of an embattled Palestine during WWII, the jubilation after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine and create a Jewish state, the violence and deprivations of Israel's war of independence and the months-long Arab siege of Jerusalem. This is a powerful, nimbly constructed saga of a man, a family and a nation forged in the crucible of a difficult, painful history. (Nov.) --Staff (Reviewed November 15, 2004) (Publishers Weekly, vol 251, issue 46, p56)
Library Journal:
Award-winning Israeli author Oz (The Same Sea ), whose childhood ambition was to be a book, has constructed a memoir full of family wisdom, history, and culture. Oz's father was a librarian and, like his mother, a member of the local literary community. In the 1940s, a time of great upheaval in Jerusalem, young Oz believed that if he were a book there would be a good chance that one copy of him would survive and "find a safe place on some godforsaken bookshelf." The influence of Oz's parents on his career as a writer dominates this warm, funny, personal history; a standout anecdote involves Oz's grandfather, who revealed to his grandson the key to being admired by many women: be a good listener. As much as this distinguished book details the lives of the Oz family, it also captures the history of Israel. For biography, literature, and history collections in academic and public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/04.]—Joyce Sparrow, Juvenile Welfare Board of Pinellas Cty., FL --Joyce Sparrow (Reviewed August 15, 2004) (Library Journal, vol 129, issue 13, p80)
Kirkus:
/* Starred Review */ A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author's youth in a newly created Israel."Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days," writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, "was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer." Oz's uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, "the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship," even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence "a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air." His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. ("My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.") Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. "In Nehemiah Street," writes Oz, "once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they'll burn us all." In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.A boon for admirers of Oz's work and contemporary Israeli literature in general. (Kirkus Reviews, July 14, 2004) Further information:
Marina Singh, a medical researcher at a pharmaceutical company in Minnesota, is sent deep into the Amazon basin to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Anders Eckman, her lab partner. Her original mission was to bring back news of Dr. Annick Swenson, a charming but despotic professor who is on the company's payroll working on a miracle fertility drug. The pharmaceutical company wants Dr. Swenson and the new drug tracked down. The widow, Karen, does not believe her husband is dead. Only Marina can perform the mission impossible and bring back evidence for both parties.
/* Starred Review */ Patchett (Bel Canto) is a master storyteller who has an entertaining habit of dropping ordinary people into extraordinary and exotic circumstances to see what they're made of. In this expansive page-turner, Marina Singh, a big pharma researcher, is sent by her married boss/lover to the deepest, darkest corner of the Amazon to investigate the death of her colleague, Anders Eckman, who had been dispatched to check on the progress of the incommunicado Dr. Annick Swenson, a rogue scientist on the cusp of developing a fertility drug that could rock the medical profession (and reap enormous profits). After arriving in Manaus, Marina travels into her own heart of darkness, finding Dr. Swenson's camp among the Lakashi, a gentle but enigmatic tribe whose women go on bearing children until the end of their lives. As Marina settles in, she goes native, losing everything she had held on to so dearly in her prescribed Midwestern life, shedding clothing, technology, old loves, and modern medicine in order to find herself. Patchett's fluid prose dissolves in the suspense of this out-there adventure, a juggernaut of a trip to the crossroads of science, ethics, and commerce that readers will hate to see end. (June) --Staff (Reviewed April 4, 2011) (Publishers Weekly, vol 258, issue 14, p)
Library Journal:
/* Starred Review */ In this superbly rendered novel, Patchett (Run ) takes the reader into the primitive world of the Amazon in Brazil. Pharmacologist Marina Singh from Minnesota works for the pharmaceutical company Vogel. Her colleague Anders Eckman dies in the jungle while trying to locate Dr. Annick Swenson, who has been working on a fertility drug for Vogel by studying the Lakashi people, whose women bear children into old age. Marina's journey to the Amazon to find the uncommunicative and intimidating Dr. Swenson and to discover the details of Anders's death is fraught with poisonous snakes and poisonous memories, malarial mosquitoes and sickening losses, but her time among the Lakashi tribe is transformative. VERDICT Not a sentimental view of a primitive people, Patchett's portrayal is as wonderful as it is frightening and foreign. Patchett exhibits an extraordinary ability to bring the horrors and the wonders of the Amazon jungle to life, and her singular characters are wonderfully drawn. Readers who enjoy exotic locales will especially be interested, but all will find this story powerful and captivating. [See Prepub Alert, 11/29/10.]— Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA --Joy Humphrey (Reviewed April 1, 2011) (Library Journal, vol 136, issue 6, p84)
Kirkus:
/* Starred Review */ A pharmacologist travels into the Amazonian heart of darkness in this spellbinder from bestselling author Patchett (Run,? 2007, etc.).Marina Singh is dispatched from the Vogel pharmaceutical company to Brazil to find out what happened to her colleague Anders Eckman, whose death was announced in a curt letter from Annick Swenson. Anders had been sent to check on Dr. Swenson's top-secret research project among the Lakashi tribe, whose women continue to bear children into their 60s and 70s. If a fertility drug can be derived from whatever these women are ingesting, the potential rewards are so enormous that Swenson has been pursuing her work for years with scant oversight from Vogel; the company doesn't even know exactly where she is in the Amazon. Marina, who went into pharmacology after making a disastrous mistake as an obstetrics resident under Dr. Swenson's supervision, really doesn't want to see this intimidating woman again, but she feels an obligation to her friend Anders and his grief-stricken wife. So she goes to Manaus, seeking clues to Dr. Swenson's location in the jungle. By the time the doctor turns up unexpectedly, Patchett has skillfully crafted a portrait from Marina's memories and subordinates' comments that gives Swenson the dark eminence of Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz. Engaged like Kurtz in godlike pursuits among the natives, Swenson is performing some highly unorthodox experiments, the ramifications of which have even more possibilities than Vogel imagines. Indeed, the multiple and highly dramatic developments that ensue once Marina gets to the Lakashi village might seem ridiculous, if Patchett had not created such credible characters and a dreamlike milieu in which anything seems possible. Nail-biting action scenes include a young boy's near-mortal crushing by a 15-foot anaconda, whose head Marina lops off with a machete; they're balanced by contemplative moments that give this gripping novel spiritual and metaphysical depth, right down to the final startling plot twist.Thrilling, disturbing and moving in equal measures—even better than Patchett's breakthrough Bel Canto (2001).(Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2011) Further reading:
