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REVIEWS |
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Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
Monday, July 12, 7:00 pm ~ Laurel Lake
Meeting Room |
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FPublishers
Weekly
Starred Review. Thirteen linked tales from
Strout (Abide with Me, etc.) present
a heart-wrenching, penetrating portrait of
ordinary coastal Mainers living lives of
quiet grief intermingled with flashes of
human connection. The opening Pharmacy
focuses on terse, dry junior high-school
teacher Olive Kitteridge and her gregarious
pharmacist husband, Henry, both of whom have
survived the loss of a psychologically
damaged parent, and both of whom suffer
painful attractions to co-workers. Their
son, Christopher, takes center stage in A
Little Burst, which describes his wedding in
humorous, somewhat disturbing detail, and in
Security, where Olive, in her 70s, visits
Christopher and his family in New York.
Strout's fiction showcases her ability to
reveal through familiar details—the
mother-of-the-groom's wedding dress, a
grandmother's disapproving observations of
how her grandchildren are raised—the seeds
of tragedy. Themes of suicide, depression,
bad communication, aging and love, run
through these stories, none more vivid or
touching than Incoming Tide, where Olive
chats with former student Kevin Coulson as
they watch waitress Patty Howe by the
seashore, all three struggling with their
own misgivings about life. Like this story,
the collection is easy to read and
impossible to forget. Its literary craft and
emotional power will surprise readers
unfamiliar with Strout
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The Given Day
by Dennis Lehane
Monday, August 9, 7:00 pm ~ Laurel Lake Room |
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Publishers
Weekly
Starred Review. In a splendid flowering of
the talent previously demonstrated in his
crime fiction (Gone, Baby, Gone;
Mystic River), Lehane combines
20th-century American history, a gripping
story of a family torn by pride and the
strictures of the Catholic Church, and the
plot of a multifaceted thriller. Set in
Boston during and after WWI, this engrossing
epic brings alive a pivotal period in our
cultural maturation through a pulsing
narrative that exposes social turmoil,
political chicanery and racial prejudice,
and encompasses the Spanish flu pandemic,
the Boston police strike of 1919 and
red-baiting and anti-union violence.Danny
Coughlin, son of police captain Thomas
Coughlin, is a devoted young beat cop in
Boston's teeming North End. Anxious to prove
himself worthy of his legendary father, he
agrees to go undercover to infiltrate the
Bolsheviks and anarchists who are recruiting
the city's poverty-stricken immigrants. He
gradually finds himself sympathetic to those
living in similar conditions to his fellow
policemen, who earn wages well below the
poverty line, work in filthy, rat-infested
headquarters, are made to pay for their own
uniforms and are not compensated for
overtime. Danny also rebels by falling in
love with the family's spunky Irish
immigrant maid, a woman with a past. Danny's
counterpart in alienation is Luther
Laurence, a spirited black man first
encountered in the prologue when Babe Ruth
sees him playing softball in Ohio. After
Luther kills a man in Tulsa, he flees to
Boston, where he becomes intertwined with
Danny's family. This story of fathers and
sons, love and betrayal, idealism and
injustice, prejudice and brotherly feeling
is a dark vision of the brutality inherent
in human nature and the dire fate of some
who try to live by ethical standards. It's
also a vision of redemption and a triumph of
the human spirit. In short, this nail-biter
carries serious moral gravity
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A Long Way Gone
by Ishmael Beah
Monday, September 13, 7:00 pm ~ Laurel Lake Room |
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Publishers
Weekly
Starred Review. This absorbing
account by a young man who, as a boy of 12,
gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war
goes beyond even the best journalistic
efforts in revealing the life and mind of a
child abducted into the horrors of warfare.
Beah's harrowing journey transforms him
overnight from a child enthralled by
American hip-hop music and dance to an
internal refugee bereft of family, wandering
from village to village in a country grown
deeply divided by the indiscriminate
atrocities of unruly, sociopathic rebel and
army forces. Beah then finds himself in the
army—in a drug-filled life of casual mass
slaughter that lasts until he is 15, when
he's brought to a rehabilitation center
sponsored by UNICEF and partnering NGOs. The
process marks out Beah as a gifted spokesman
for the center's work after his
"repatriation" to civilian life in the
capital, where he lives with his family and
a distant uncle. When the war finally
engulfs the capital, it sends 17-year-old
Beah fleeing again, this time to the U.S.,
where he now lives. (Beah graduated from
Oberlin College in 2004.) Told in clear,
accessible language by a young writer with a
gifted literary voice, this memoir seems
destined to become a classic firsthand
account of war and the ongoing plight of
child soldiers in conflicts worldwide
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