Reading this sweeping and sensitive novel, I was amazed that Min Jin Lee could use such simple language to reveal compelling, complex characters. Full of surprises, no character is black and white. My feelings and judgments about them kept shifting in ways that tested my biases.
Following generations of a family, Lee covers the painful history of colonized and war-torn Korea, and the discrimination Koreans face in Japan. The plight of women, especially, but also of men, who live in a culture of shame. But she tells the lessons of history through the intimate, personal struggles of the family, and the resilience of the main character Sunja. I appreciated how Lee keeps Sunja returning to the mundane amid turbulent events. The mundane is grounding and offers relief as it does in real life.
* The million-copy bestseller* * National Book Award finalist * * One of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2017 * * Selected for Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club *
'This is a captivating book... Min Jin Lee's novel takes us through four generations and each character's search for identity and success. It's a powerful story about resilience and compassion' BARACK OBAMA.
Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja…
David Stannard is a masterful storyteller, and for me this history of crime in Hawaii was a page turner. As a colonial power, the US treated its subjects under a regime of white supremacy, much like the American South. For immigrants who worked on the plantations from the Philippines, Pacific Islands, and Far East, it was divide and conquer. And the whites in control were mentally ill as well as cruel.
Yet this history has a relevant and salient message for us today. The crime and infamous trial, with Clarence Darrow on the wrong side, led ethnic groups and Native Hawaiians to get to know and support each other. It was transformative, and Hawaii has been better for it ever since. If only we today can learn from this history!
In the fall of 1931, Thalia Massie, the bored, aristocratic wife of a young naval officer stationed in Honolulu, accused six nonwhite islanders of gang rape. The ensuing trial let loose a storm of racial and sexual hysteria, but the case against the suspects was scant and the trial ended in a hung jury. Outraged, Thalia’s socialite mother arranged the kidnapping and murder of one of the suspects. In the spectacularly publicized trial that followed, Clarence Darrow came to Hawai’i to defend Thalia’s mother, a sorry epitaph to a noble career.
I call this book a favorite because of the persistent questions it raised only after I turned the last page. How do we discern truth from fiction, and then from AI? What does it mean that the first-person narrator Todd is sinking into the ravaged world of Lewy Body Dementia, complete with hallucinations, and still able to write? Todd’s musings are not alone; there is another narrator who tells much of the story. As in others, Richard Powers bases some characters on real people, their scientific triumphs or, in this case, libertarian tech-bro ambitions. The game of Go and wonders of the ocean cast a spell and set the context. Many ocean passages about the South Pacific are ecstatic in the beautiful way that Powers always honors nature.
A magisterial new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory and Bewilderment.
Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while…
In 1964, the FBI found smoldering remains of the station wagon that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were driving before they disappeared at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Shortly after, Julie Kabat’s beloved brother Luke arrived in Mississippi as a volunteer to assist Black civil rights workers who were challenging white supremacy in the nation’s most segregated state. As an activist, Luke grappled with issues that still plague us today. “I am fighting a nonviolent battle,” he wrote, “because I believe that hate begets hate and perhaps that love begets love.” Tragically, Luke died two years later leaving copious letters, diaries, and essays. Kabat delves deeply into their family history and meets fellow surviving volunteers and Freedom School students who declare the life-long legacy of Freedom Summer. The book is available in print and as an audiobook narrated by the author.
