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The Lacuna: A Novel | 
| Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
List Price: $26.99
Buy Used: $3.24
as of 9/3/2010 12:07 CDT details
You Save: $23.75 (88%)
Seller: gwspokanebooks
Rating:  reviews
Sales Rank: 9477
Format: Deckle Edge
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 528
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 0060852577
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780060852573
ASIN: 0060852577
Publication Date: November 1, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780060852573 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Blew Me Away, But It Is Different for Kingsolver August 30, 2010
L. Erickson (Los Angeles, CA)
This book really blew me away. I am a Kingsolver fan, but honestly, this is very different for her. As the first reviewer said, this is literature with a capital 'L', and not a light read. It's a heady exploration of history, memory, writing, and identity, especially America's current identity, as formed during World War II, and the period afterward that birthed the cold war and the rise of anti-communism, in the form of the 'House Subcommittee on Un-American Activities'. I don't think anything I've read before - fiction of nonfiction - has helped me to understand the America of today more than this book did. It's an excavation of what formed our contemporary national psyche and sensibility.
Of course, it's not an essay, it's a novel, and all of this is done through the fictional characters Harrison Shepherd and Violet Brown. The story is mostly told through Harrison's journal entries and personal letters, with some additions by Violet, interspersed with press clippings (some fictional and some real.) Actual historical characters are featured throughout, including Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Lev Trotsky, and many American political figures. The mix of forms and voices is part of the 'lacuna' theme of the story - what we don't know or can't readily see is often the most important part. It's also sometimes a challenge - we don't have any through-thread carrying us along. But that's part of the fun and insight too. We are reading how history is formed.
I didn't find this book preachy, although it most certainly is political (and Kingsolver skewers the press.) And I didn't find the main characters boring, as some other reviewers did. There were some journal entries that I admit skimming, but overall I found this book riveting once it got going, and couldn't put it down towards the end. But as I said, it's not a light read.
It's on my lifetime Top Five books! August 29, 2010
D. Zemanek (El Cerrito, CA USA)
Read it. Don't read about it. One book worth any or all your time. Fantastic!
Best of my summer. . . August 27, 2010
J. Marren (Glen Ridge, NJ USA)
. . .or maybe my year. I've always liked Kingsolver, but in this first novel in nine years she's outdone herself. A "lacuna," an empty space, a missing part, a gap. In the life of Harrison Shepherd, a fascinating passage under the sea through rock to another world. Then a missing journal, later a path to freedom.
Harrison Shepherd is half-American, half Mexican, the son of a neglectful Washington bureaucrat and a mother always on the move, looking for a man who will be their ticket to stability. Harrison has a solitary childhood, never going to school, learning skills in the kitchen that will take him to unlikely places. But most of all he's obsessed with words, making his existence real through the writing on the page. In Mexico he catches the eye of the famous painter Diego Rivera; learning how to mix flour and water in the kitchen, he's the only man in the crew who can mix the plaster for Rivera's murals. We get a fascinating look into the world of Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, with Lev Trotsky, who comes to them for protection. These early experiences will come to haunt him when he returns to the U.S. later on, during the height of the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the McCarthy witch hunts.
But all this makes it sound tame--Shepherd is a unique character who moves through the world as an innocent. Gradually he withdraws from life, having seen too much of the contradictions in the world, but becomes a writer. He forges the strongest relationship he ever has with tiny, tidy, Mrs. Violet Brown, and the ending of this unlikely bond brought tears to my eyes--twice.
Kingsolver's parallels between the 50's and the present are striking and deliberate. Why do we turn on our own people when we are most frightened? Why do we suspend the very rights that the "enemy" is trying to take away from us? One need only substitute the words "Terrorist" or "Muslim" for "Communist," and it's the beginning of the 21st century. What happens to Shepherd and Mrs. Brown felt very personal, and gave me much to think about. I highly recommend this novel!
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