Book Reviews — Page 6

May we, like the elves, find the time and enough love in our hearts to welcome the foreigner, the unbeliever, the lonely stranger half crazy from grief, and turn him into a valued member of our communities.

Behind every word the reader can sense the implacable tread of life itself moving warily, silently, away from oblivion. By any means necessary.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie carries a dozen boldly sketched characters through 588 engrossing pages with a tale that pokes into our (surprisingly sensitive) national and racial selves.

This is a magnificent book, and I am not alone in thinking so. The New York Times Book Review calls it a “tour de force,” others compare it to Madame Bovary and War and Peace.

Magnuson skitters over the top of her Indian experience, barely able to breathe.

If forgiveness can bloom for the Gardner family, then there is hope for us all.

Dr. Siri is the wise-cracking Laotian septuagenarian national coroner of Laos. That’s funny already, right?

The point of this brilliant book is that life is, and there is simply nothing more to say. So, logically, I should just stop here, but I’m not yet mistress of the short form.

Put together The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, 365 Days by Karl Glasser, and Redeployment and you have all the reasons you will ever need to be a pacifist, or a reluctant warrior at the very least.