A finalist in 1994 for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise hides major themes and ideas within the seemingly simple story of Yusuf, a twelve-year-old boy in rural East Africa whose father sells him to a trader to settle a debt. East Africa is in turmoil–on the verge of World War I and the fighting which eventually develops between the Germans in Tanzania and the British in Kenya. Cities are growing, populations are moving, merchants are trading and selling, and colonialists from many countries are vying for influence. A novel which begins as a beautifully realized coming-of-age story develops into a story of high adventure, social and political realism, and eventually love.
Read Full Post »
Posted in Exploration, Historical, Kenya, Sudan on Jan 15th, 2011
Setting his massive, almost 700-page novel in Sudan and neighboring Kenya, Philip Caputo details the extraordinary efforts of non-government organizations (NGOs) from around the world to bring aid into “no-go” zones, those zones declared so dangerous that the UN will not enter. Many of these agencies ferry aid through the use of bush pilots and small airlines from Kenya, which fly into Sudan and land on hidden, usually make-shift, landing strips, often dodging small-arms fire and enemy aircraft when they try to return home. The Muslim government of Sudan, located to the north in Khartoum, has long been at war with the oil-rich, largely Christian south, and atrocities occur on a regular basis—the abduction of children for children’s armies, the rape and enslavement of women, the maiming and mutilation of the healthy, the cutting off of food and water, and the theft of medical supplies to prevent disease. Lacking weapons and ammunition, the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) is no match for the heavily supplied army from Khartoum.The action is generated by characters who fly for Knight Air out of Kenya—Fitzhugh Martin, a mixed race Kenyan; Douglas Braithwaite, an American entrepreneur and pilot; and Wesley Dare, a Texas mercenary—along with their lovers, an Anglo-Kenyan philanthropist and a female Canadian pilot.
Read Full Post »
Posted in England, Japan, Singapore on Jan 13th, 2011
When the Japanese invaded China in 1937 and French Indo-China in 1941, all part of Japan’s expansive efforts to establish the Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere, the handwriting should have been on the wall for the colony of Singapore, one of Great Britain’s most important military and economic centers, located as it is between India and China. Hubris, and the sense that their military power could not be realistically challenged, however, led to Britain’s lack of military preparedness and the astonishingly quick takeover of Malaya and Singapore by the Japanese in 1942, handing the British what Winston Churchill called “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.” Author J. G. Farrell recreates these traumatic days in Singapore as the final novel in his “Empire Trilogy,” which, like Troubles (1970), about the Easter Rebellion in Ireland (1916) and The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), about the Muslim Mutiny in India in 1857, combines Farrell’s cynicism, black humor, and sense of absurdity with his uncompromising honesty about colonialism–Britain’s greed, its colonial “mission,” its superior attitudes, and its cruelty toward the local people they consider their “subjects.”
Read Full Post »
Just after author Yukio Mishima finished the final novel in his “Sea of Fertility” tetralogy on November 25, 1970, he disemboweled himself in a ritual suicide—seppuku—committed in the presence of four members of his private army. He was then beheaded, in accordance with ritual. Mishima, aged forty-five, believed whole-heartedly in the strengths of the old Japanese emperors and in the strong, aristocratic culture that had evolved from the samurai. He never forgave Emperor Hirohito for denying his godliness at the end of World War II, and he despaired of the political wrong-headedness he saw on both the right and the left a generation after the war. Spring Snow, written in 1966, is the first of the four novels of what is generally regarded as his masterpiece, a series which explores the essence of life, the spiritual beliefs which make that life meaningful, the obligations of man to a wider society, the relationship of chance to free will, and the glory of dying for one’s beliefs. By using a historical approach, with each of these novels taking place later than the previous one, and by repeating his characters, Mishima allows the reader to see Japanese cultural and social history change over a fifty-year period. Spring Snow begins in 1912.
Read Full Post »
When the atomic bomb dropped at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was a thriving city of two hundred forty-five thousand people. By 8:20, one hundred thousand of those people were dead. Combining the broad perspective of the absolute devastation of the city with the tiniest details of six individual lives, John Hersey provides a powerful closeup of a few survivors of the atomic attack on Hiroshima, giving the carnage a human perspective. The victims become human, and their concerns become universal, as Hersey shows them digging themselves out and helping their neighbors, filled with an “elated community spirit” in the days and weeks after the bombing. (To see the entire review, click on the title of this excerpt.)
Read Full Post »
