Well, this is Linda's last day in Georgia. We've had a wonderful time with her and we'll miss her. I think she's liked what she saw of Statesboro, Beaufort, and Savannah. She bought us lots of stuff - too much! - got to spend time with Gabriel and Daisy, was able to relax, and shared (and cooked) some firs-rate meals with us. We hope she comes back again soon.
Julia is enjoying her first week of no summer classes. Gabriel is enjoying summer school. And Daisy is enjoying her new chain and leash.
I was so happy to hear (and shocked) that my parents bought a new home! It's a nice, cottage-like home in Amberley village in Cincinnati! Hooray! It is my mom's dream house and I'm so glad that her and my dad purchased it.
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On this date in 1892, Pearl S. Buck was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Buck's parents were Southern Presbyterian missionaries who were stationed in China. In 1892, on furlough, they came home to West Virginia and Pearl was born; the home is now a museum and Nationally Registered home. At three months of age, she went to China with her parents. Buck, whom readers today tend to (accurately) associate with China, spent the majority of the first forty years of her life there; she was taught by her mother and a Chinese tutor, and she could speak both English and Chinese from an early age.
In 1910, Buck returned to the states (her parents stayed in China) and attended school at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, West Virginia. After graduating, she changed her plans to stay in the states and returned to China because of the grave illness of her mother. In 1917, she met a Cornell agronomist, John Lossing Buck, who was in China studying the country's rural economy. They married and remained unhappily so, living in China, for the next eighteen years; the couple had two children. For thirteen years, Pearl and John lived in Nanking.
In 1930, Buck's first novel was published - East Wind, West Wind. The publisher of the novel, Richard Walsh, would eventually become Buck's second husband. Her second novel, The Good Earth, would become one of the biggest, bestselling books of the century, winning the Pulitzer Prize. (Seven years later, Buck would win the Nobel Prize in Literature; she was the first American woman to do so.)
In the mid-1930s, Buck moved back to the states to be with Richard Walsh and her daughter, Carol, who was mentally retarded and institutionalized in New Jersey. Buck and Walsh's house, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is also now a Nationally Registered Historic Building. The couple adopted six more children.
From the University of Pennsylvania's Pearl S. Buck bio:
From the day of her move to the US, Pearl was active in American civil
rights and women's rights activities. She published essays in both Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, and Opportunity, the magazine of the Urban League; she was a trustee of Howard University
for twenty years, beginning in the early 1940s. In 1942, Pearl and
Richard founded the East and West Association, dedicated to cultural
exchange and understanding between Asia and the West. In 1949, outraged
that existing adoption services considered Asian and mixed-race
children unadoptable, Pearl established Welcome House, the first
international, inter-racial adoption agency; in the nearly five decades
of its work, Welcome House has assisted in the placement of over five
thousand children. In 1964, to provide support for Amerasian children
who were not eligible for adoption, Pearl also established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which provides sponsorship funding for thousands of children in half-a-dozen Asian countries.
Pearl Buck died in March, 1973, just two months before her eighty-first birthday. She is buried at Green Hills Farm.
I'm sure we've all heard of - or read - The Good Earth, but what other books did Buck write? I think it's a valid question because we associate this prolific author - who wrote about 80 novels, many of which have been long out of print and heard to track down - with just one novel. Here are three other books she wrote, besides The Good Earth and the other two books that make up The Good Earth trilogy: Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935):
Pavilion of Women (1946) I've read this one. It's a solid, straightforward account, set in the rural Chinese countryside, of a middle-aged woman who, feeling that she has done her duties as a wife, urges her husband to take on a second wife. She herself is drawn to a foreign priest. Made into a movie in 2000 with Willem Dafoe.
Dragon Seed (1942) The story of Tzu Hsi, the story of China's last empress, set against the backdrop for Chinese democracy. Again, it's about the simple life (with roiling emotions) of a Chinese village family set around World War II.
Peony (1948) A young Chinese girl, Peony, is sold into a Jewish family as a bondmaid. She grows up and falls in love with the oldest son of the family. Tradition forbids them from marrying. How can she resolve it?
Buck, who was said to repeat her themes and storylines a bit, was a careful, deliberate writer, who wrote in a simple, exacting style. She was a fine writer and an important person and was instrumental in changing the ways Americans de-mythologized the Chinese people.
Happy birthday, Pearl!
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Movie Review
The Grey
You know that The Grey (2012), an unusually fine action film directed muscularly by Joe Carnahan, is going to achieve a brutal, barren, bare-bones authenticity early on: The characters, the eight surviving members of a plane crash, are standing around the Alaskan tundra, and the wind is howling so hard - and for so long - that you can barely make out what anyone is saying. (It's a bit annoying). Once the characters get moving, which they have to do because they're being hunted by a particularly vicious and territorial pack of wolves, the story picks up, which isn't to say that the opening plane crash doesn't pack a queasy, startling jolt of verisimilitude.
But when the oil workers, led by a physically imposing, haunted Liam Neeson, start their march - or, rather, trudge - to what they think might be safety and the wolves start closing in, the movie really ropes you. (The wolves, of course, are CGI.) The characters seem like they might be cliches at first - the hothead, the sick one, the quiet one, the leader, etc. - but the more dwindling time we get to spend with them, the sadder it is when they go.
The movie has some terrific scenes that pack a wallop, all the while achieving an elegant sense of loss and grief, even a spiritual restlessness. It has a blunt force and is constantly surprising, well-filmed (in British Columbia) and brutal. The ending has a nice buildup (a character looks at the wallets of his departed/eaten colleagues and sees these hard men with their wives and children) and an ambiguity that, like the film itself, stays with you. It's Alive meets Frozen meets Call of the Wild.
And Neeson, is of course, terrific. He continues to pop out one action feast after another - and outstanding ones too. He is streamlined and focused, toweringly rough-edged and brisk, providing us with a comforting sense that he is not one to be messed with.
(***1/2)
*
Book Review
I've enjoyed the books I've read so far by Douglas Kennedy.
Until I read State of the Union (2007), a shrill, one-note tale that took me about a month to read - a great sign for a thriller.
The ludicrous story starts off in 1973, when Hannah Buchan, the daughter of a famed leftist professor, marries a dull, unexciting doctor and moves to small-town Maine. An on-the-run liberal radical, Tobias Judson, comes to town, and Hannah has an affair with him, after which he admits to her that he housed two Weathermen bombers, and is wanted by the FBI. He blackmails her into driving him to the Canadian border. Cue: massive guilt .
Thirty years later, in a politically divisive America dominated by unkind, non-perceptive loudmouths, Hannah's daughter goes missing. The drama is compounded when it is revealed that in Tobias' bestselling tell-all that Hannah helped Judson flee the country. Soap opera, soap opera. I'm not sure what it is Kennedy's trying to say about the relationship between sixties radicalism how that eventually got tided over (or congealed) into today's nonsensical political extremities and witch hunting. What is this dumb novel even about? To Kennedy, everyone on the right is an arrogant, stupid moron. You can write a novel in which the deck is stacked, okay, but the characters contrasting the brash, one-note types have to be somewhat interesting or likable, and herer they're not. The dialogue is horrendous - the characters don't sound like people; they don't show or reveal to us anything, they tell us things, they lecture, they philosophize (Kennedy's philosophizing in general is getting old.) Small-town life here is a cliche; in fact, everything feels washed-over and stale, old news. And the author should be flat-out embarrassed by a late scene in which he re-introduces a character, an autistic handiman, for a dramatic reveal and has him defending himself against Tobias (now fat and balding, of course) by claiming, "I ain't no retard. I'm just difference, that's all." Ick.
And here's a giveaway: The daughter isn't dead. There, I saved you time.
I need to read Kennedy's The Moment (2011) to get this one out of my mouth.
The pits.
(*)
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You ready to see who's next up on my 500 Greatest Performances of All Time? Sure you are! It's...
Anjelica Huston
as Lilly Dillon in The Grifters (1990)
Adapted by crime novelist Donald Westlake and directed by the versatile Stephen Frears, Jim Thompson's novel played really well on screen and the cast crackled (John Cusack, Annette Bening), no one more so than Anjelica Huston playing a mother that could frighten grown men. Huston's cold, venial, monstrous Lilly, Cusack's mother, is the mom from hell - clipped, overpowering, uncompromising, viperish, and ready to collect. Huston can play about anything, and she gets an opportunity to do so here - simpering, nasty,victimized, playful, hard-edged, controlling, and, above all, deadly sexual. Huston, in her blond wig, truly possesses a stifling sexuality here, and she gets a great death, too.
(Note: The author profile usually done on Monday will be published in tomorrow's blogpost.)
Images:
http://www.craveonline.com/images/stories/2011/Film/The_Grey_Liam_Neeson%281%29.jpg
http://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/cvr9781451602098_9781451602098.jpg
http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1287707364l/209279.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51S9PFc%2B1ZL._SL500_AA300_.jpg
http://ehsanknopf.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/vlcsnap-4501031.png
Information:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/Buck/biography.html
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