Buck Books

This 1932 Pulitzer Prize winning novel is still a standout today. Deceptive in its simplicity, it is a story built around a flawed human being and a teetering socio-economic system, as well as one that is layered with profound themes. The cadence of the author's writing is also of note, as it rhythmically lends itself to the telling of the story, giving it a very distinct voice. No doubt the author's writing style was influenced by her own immersion in Chinese culture, as she grew up and lived in China, the daughter of missionaries.

This is the story of the cyclical nature of life, of the passions and desires that motivate a human being, of good and evil, and of the desire to survive and thrive against great odds. It begins with the story of an illiterate, poor, peasant farmer, Wang Lung, who ventures from the rural countryside and goes to town to the great house of Hwang to obtain a bride from those among the rank of slave. There, he is given the slave O-lan as his bride.

Selfless, hardworking, and a bearer of sons, the plain-faced O-lan supports Wang Lung's veneration of the land and his desire to acquire more land. She stays with him through thick and thin, through famine and very lean times, working alongside him on the land, making great sacrifices, and raising his children. As a family, they weather the tumultuousness of pre-revolutionary China in the 1920s, only to find themselves the recipient of riches beyond their dreams. At the first opportunity, they buy land from the great house of Hwang, whose expenses appear to be exceeding their income.

With the passing of time, Wang Lung buys more and more land from the house of Hwang, until he owns it all, as his veneration of the land is always paramount. With O-lan at this side, his family continues to prosper. His life becomes more complicated, however, the richer he gets. Wang Lung then commits a life-changing act that pierces O-lan's heart in the most profoundly heartbreaking way.

As the years pass, his sons become educated and literate, and the family continues to prosper. With the great house of Hwang on the skids, an opportunity to buy their house, the very same house from where he had fetched O-lan many years ago, becomes available. Pressed upon to buy that house by his sons, who do not share Wang Lung's veneration for the land and rural life, he buys the house. The country mice now have become city mice.

This is a potent story, brimming with irony, yet simply told against a framework of mounting social change. It is a story that stands as a parable in many ways and is one that certainly should be read. It illustrates the timeless dichotomy between the young and the old, the old and the new, and the rich and the poor. It is no wonder that this beautifully written book won a Pulitzer Prize and is considered a classic masterpiece. Bravo!

I have re-read Mutual Consent repeatedly since I first bought it. The hero and heroine are beautifully drawn, as are the incidental characters; the heroine's aunt, her father, the hero's mother and his close male friends. This is a marriage of convenience plot, and the couple's efforts to understand each other and the misunderstandings between them are very well done. Barbara Cribbage is honest, forthright and intelligent. The Earl of Chatworth is arrogant and powerful, yet his concern for his mother shows his vulnerable side. I highly recommend this book as well as any of Ms Buck's work. She does the arrogant, disdainful aristocrat to perfection, but the way her lady's finally appeal to their lord's better instincts is usually subtle and a surprise. Enjoy!

I love this series of scripture books. The pictures are beautiful and the stories are well selected and age appropriate for small children. Sturdy board books.

I love this series of scripture books. The pictures are beautiful and the stories are well selected and age appropriate for small children. Sturdy board books.

Buck-Morss is a lucid and passionate guide to the difficult work of Adorno and Benjamin. This is not to say that she presents their work in an easily digestible form. Indeed, Buck-Morss's clarity makes readers appreciate how much they must be aware of to understand what Adorno and Benjamin were up to. Buck-Morss's valuable discussions of Kant, Hegel, Lukacs, Horkheimer, Schoenberg, and others, make plain that there is no easy introduction to these figures, as fascinating as their ideas may be.

This book's most important contribution to the English-language literature on critical theory is its exposition of Adorno's debts to Benjamin, despite their disagreements. It's hard to imagine what Adorno's body of work would have looked like without his relationship with Benjamin. If there is a limitation here it is Buck-Morss's apparent (but not uncritical) preference for Adorno to Benjamin that belies her later appreciation for Benjamin in The Dialectics of Seeing and Dreamworld and Catastrophe. This work is steeped in cultural history, biographical detail, and philosophy, so if you find critical theory seductive but somewhat hellish, Buck-Morss is your Vergil.

This is an inspired work of scholarship that is inexplicably difficult to find. Now that Amazon.com has a few copies, buy yours now. Whether you're a novice or a scholar, it will really make you appreciate the poverty of contemporary American scholarship on Adorno and Benjamin.

Beautifully written about a young girl's life during the Depression. Meg is a wee bit lazy working in the fields, but inside the house she finds a mystery. Her Papa left a trunk and its contents draw Meg like a magnet. Does she find a way for the family to rise above the devastation of the Great Depression or a treasure for the family's soul? Her determination to find out, pushes the reader forward to the last page, hoping this little girl and her family find the gold at the end of the rainbow.

Meg and her brother, Pod, capture hearts and minds, bringing joy in the middle of one of America's darkest hours.

Pamela Gayle "Peachy" Keene, having confronted her own mortality during a bad landing in a commercial airplane at the age of 23, concludes that she does not wish to depart hence into another place while she is still a virgin. She considers her options and makes a direct, clear, approach to her friend and landlord, Luc Devereaux, for assistance in dealing with this problem.

Luc isn't sure she knows what she's doing; the other inhabitants of their apartment building in New Orleans (two retired twin sisters, former demi-mondaines; a former professional athlete who is now in touch with his feminine side, a somewhat less retired member of Britain's MI5, and a possible descendent of voodoo queen Marie Laveau) aren't sure that either of the protagonists knows what he/she is/should be doing.

There are numerous, quite calculated, interruptions before the couple manages to evade their self-appointed chaperones and achieve their goal, but ultimately all is well.

Gao (Southern Univ., New Orleans) does not cite Kang Liao's "Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge across the Pacific" but both scholars provide contemporary Chinese perspective on the Nobel Prize-winning writer. Gao praises the female portraits in five of Buck's novels: the aristocratic women of East Wind: West Wind and Pavilion of Women, the servant women in Peony, and the peasant women in The Mother and Buck's most famous book, The Good Earth. Especially valuable are Gao's comments on those aspects of Chinese culture that shaped Buck's characterizations. For example, Confucius's low opinion of women had a lasting impact on females' social position, but the nation's increasing contact with the West in the modern era challenged many taditional gender roles. At the end of this slim volume, Gao concludes that "with their different degrees of individuality and typicality, Buck's women characters, taken together, provide the reader with a realistic picture of Chinese women." And, regardless of their rank, "all of Buck's women characters use their limited power to achieve what they deserve." J.W. Hall, University of Mississippi

Great book, very reputable genealogists supervising the "proofs" required to qualify for this organization. Exciting to see many of the names from history come alive, as you can then take any of these names and trace them back even further in books like Royalty for Commoners by Roderick W. Stuart.

This history of Polynesia by a man with a Maori heritage should not be missed. It is brilliantly written and full of fascinating detail. Buck proves that the real history of Polynesia is every bit as engaging as the mythical history. For example, in debunking myths about Easter Island, Buck makes these astute observations:

"Any Polynesian can improvise a chant. I have improvised chants to lengthen out a recital for a European audience that did not understand the language. Neither the bishop's informant nor I had any intention of deceiving, but we were both influenced by the desire to please."

Of the Easter Island carved wooden tablets, Buck says, "There is little doubt that the tablets were carved in Easter Island itself long after the time of Hotu-matua, but were attributed to him to give them the increased antiquity that all Polynesians revere" (p. 241). He adds that "it is problem that the characters are purely pictorial and are not a form of written language" (p. 243).

Buck's conclusion about crackpot theories involving Easter Island is devastating: "The resurrection of an extinct civilization from a sunken continent to do what the Easter Islanders accomplished unaided is surely the greatest compliment ever paid to an efficient stone-age people" (p. 245).

All this applies to claims by Thor Heyerdahl, the Mormons, and the Lost Continent of Mu enthusiasts.

It is sad to think that Heyerdahl's career as a fearless adventurer is marred by his zealous devotion to a dated idea. Yes, Peruvian Indians could have crossed the Pacific, but it is more likely that contact came from the other way. At any rate, Heyerdahl manufactured the archaeological evidence he found on Easter Island.

In the July 2002 issue of the "Smithsonian Magazine," Richard Conniff demonstrated that Heyerdahl actually paid the natives to make reed-boats relics (Kon Artist?" was the title). "A good story," said Conniff, "can be so compelling that teller and subject become entrapped together in its charms...." (p. 28). This astute observation could apply to novels claimed to be actual history, and anyone interested in the Book of Mormon should give it long thought.

Heyerdahl wrote about Pedro Pate, an Easter Islander and how Pate found a two-masted reed boat in a cave. Conniff wrote: "I showed Pate a two-page photograph of the reed boat from Heyerdahl's book, and he grinned. He'd carved the boat himself, he said. Dubious, I offered him $100 to carve such a boat now, 37 years later, and he accepted." "A few days later, he presented me with the 18-inch-long reed boat he had carved. It was as good as the one in the book" (p. 29).

In "The Ancient American Civilizations," Friedrich Katz asked some very hard questions of Heyerdahl's theory.

"If the Polynesians really do come from America, why do their chronicles record the exact opposite direction, naming South-East Asia as their place of origin? Why is their language first and foremost related to South-Asiatic and Malayan languages? Finally, as Trimborn remarked, 'Were not the Polynesian Vikings, rather than the Indians, not the sailors who crossed the high seas?'" (p. 18).

Heyerdahl should also be criticized for playing word games, selecting a word here and there, but ignoring the whole language. Many linguists criticized this erroneous method of relating two ancient peoples. The Mormon writer Professor Hugh Nibley was famous for such inherently false linquistic acrobatics. See my reviews of Nibley's books: Click here: Since Cumorah (Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol 7)

See Robert Wauchope's magnificent little book, "Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents: Myth and Method in the Study of the American Indians." See my review. Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents Myth Method in the

Mormon writers frequently cite Heyerdahl because he proved that ancient voyages across the oceans were possible--an idea going back hundreds of years and not new with Heyerdahl. Very few scholars ever denied that such ancient voyages were possible. See my review of Kon Tiki. Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft

Also, read Robert Wauchope's little book "Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents: Myth and Method in the Study of the American Indians." Click here, then scroll down to my review: Lost tribes and sunken continents: Myth and method in the study of American Indians

After soaking in the misty haze of the crackpots, reading "Vikings of the Pacific" is like breathing a fresh, cool breeze.

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