November 2006 Archives

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs

In this beautiful novel, Geraldine Brooks breathes life into Mr. March, the father in Louisa May Alcott's beloved Little Women. As March is largely absent from Alcott's story, it is Brooks who truly introduces us to this character whom we follow from his youthful days as a peddler in the south to his post as a Union chaplain in the Civil War — first ministering to soldiers and later as the teacher at a contraband farm. Self-taught scholar, passionate abolitionist, and unorthodox clergyman, March is modeled on Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, with inspiration drawn from his own papers, as well as those of friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Narrated in the first person by March (with some chapters from wife Marmee's point of view), this very personal account of war, with all its brutality, inhumanity, and both physical and emotional suffering is quite disturbing, and difficult to read at times. Yet it is nicely interspersed with reminiscences of the Marches' domestic life in Concord, Massachusetts, which help create the rich character development of both March and Marmee. March won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Interested in more by Brooks, or other works about the Civil War? Check out Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks, or Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by her husband, Tony Horwitz.

Cabell Library PR9619.3.B7153 M37 2005
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Reviewed by Kevin Farley, Collection Librarian for the Humanities

The private thoughts, dreams, and desires, the inner life, of the original Renaissance man, William Shakespeare — frequently claimed as the world's greatest playwright — escape us. Living in a time before autobiography became expected of writers — before we came to demand the truth about those who bewitch us with fictions — Shakespeare left no workaday record of the machinations of his imagination. How then, we are left to ask, did someone seemingly so ordinary, the son of a failed glove-maker in rural England, emerge with such undying depictions of the human condition? To the eminent Shakespearean scholar Samuel Schoenbaum, the poet's genius eludes explanation; yet several recent biographies — especially Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt — seek to flush out the scant biography with imaginative hypotheses about the Mind of the Bard. Perhaps it takes the license of fiction to truly reveal Shakespeare's secrets, and such is the aim of the British novelist Anthony Burgess (who evokes the rowdiness of Elizabethan English in ways similar to the criminal slang of A Clockwork Orange) in Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love-Life. Shakespeare's stream-of- consciousness pours forth in Burgess' account of the poet's youth, as the vibrancy of the world, its beauties, sorrows, temptations, and triumphs, registers itself upon his imagination. We see the full complexity of what Shakespeare might very well have been like — more concerned at times with his own art than with the messy business of responsibilities. Burgess' Shakespeare is greedy for experience, willful, intent, daring, more than a bit selfish — but whose mysterious artistry takes in the world and returns it to us, transformed, renewed.

Cabell Library PR6052.U638 N6

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs

Eventide is a quiet, yet memorable, chronicle of life in Holt, a small, rural town in the Colorado plains. Many of the town's residents made their debut in the National Book Award finalist Plainsong, yet Eventide introduces memorable new characters, and is not necessarily a sequel to Haruf's earlier work. This newer novel tells the stories of a disabled couple and their children, a boy living with his grandfather, and others whose lives intersect during the course of the year. The plot unfolds somewhat slowly, but this pace seems natural, perfectly suited to the creeping days of a harsh Colorado autumn and winter. Indeed, the landscape itself — the lonely town isolated in dreary plains — is a palpable force in this novel, and also serves to highlight Haruf's beautiful, yet honest and unassuming prose. "It was a Saturday night," he writes, "the sky overhead clear of any cloud, the stars as clean and bright as if they were no more distant than the next barbed-wire fence post standing up against the barrow ditch running beside the narrow blacktop highway, everything all around him distinct and unhidden. He loved how it all looked, except he never would have said it in that way."

Though tinged with sadness, this story of decent, ordinary people has a redemptive quality that makes the novel strangely uplifting. Try Plainsong first, and I guarantee that you will want to pick up Eventide.

Cabell Library PS3558.A716 E93 2004
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