George Orwell, Author and Social Critic
Born in Motihari, India, in 1903,
Eric Arthur Blair (who later took the
pen name George Orwell) moved to
England with his mother as a small
child, returning in 1922 to serve with
the Indian Imperial Police in Burma,
then part of British India. Orwell’s
career as a writer began in 1928, and
his essays on censorship, poverty, and
unemployment set the tone for much
of his later work. A fierce critic of
fascism, he came to hold disdain for
the excesses of communism as well.
Known primarily as a journalist and essayist during his lifetime,
his interest in writing led him to sojourns in France, Morocco,
and Spain, where he fought with anti-Franco forces during the
Spanish Civil War.
He is best known today for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and
1984 (1949), which have an unabashed political message, and for
such memorable lines as “All animals are equal, but some animals
are more equal than others.” Orwell’s sharp mind and acerbic wit
are evident in his celebrated essay on a fellow India-born Englishman, Rudyard Kipling. Acknowledging and criticizing Kipling’s
“imperialist outlook,” he nevertheless credits his subject with
“one thing which ‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess,
and that is a sense of responsibility.” He asserts that Kipling is
“the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to
the language” (e.g., “East is East, and West is West” and “the
white man’s burden”), an ironic comment in view of Orwell’s
own contributions to the language, including such neologisms as
Big Brother, Thought Police, doublethink, and thoughtcrime. He
died in January 1950, shortly after the publication of 1984.
All the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr
Reviewed by Brigitte B. Saidi
This second novel by Ohio native Anthony Doerr won a Pulitzer Prize, an Andrew Carnegie Medal, was a finalist for the
National Book Award, and has been on the
New York Times Bestseller List since 2014.
Doerr’s many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently lives in Boise, Idaho and
writes a column on science books for the
Boston Globe.
All the Light We Cannot See is a beautifully crafted page-turner
set in Germany and France, before and during World War II, with
a gentle finale for the time after the war. The main characters
are Marie-Laure, a blind French girl who lives with her father
in Paris, and Werner, a German orphan from a poverty-stricken
mining town in Northwest Germany.
Marie-Laure navigates her world through fingering the carefully crafted miniatures of the area created by her Papa, a keeper
of the keys at the National Museum of Natural History. During
the war, father and daughter take refuge with relatives in St. Malo
on the Brittany coast. The museum entrusts them with a priceless
jewel from its collection, which is tracked by a Nazi agent for
Hitler’s art collection. Marie-Laure finds refuge and sustenance
in the books she can read in braille.
Werner escapes hunger and deprivation when his ability in
mathematics and engineering is recognized. He attends an elite
Nazi school where his only friend is brutalized by the system.
During the war he is drafted into a special unit tracing radio operators of the resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe and has to face
the brutal consequences of his engineering talent.
The vicissitudes of war connect these two lives when the Allies target St. Malo for bombardment. This novel has everything:
loving families, vicious Nazis, forlorn orphans, unique talents,
hidden gems, war and destruction, hardship and survival, all of
which combine to keep the reader turning the pages. As a history
major, Doerr knows how to set the stage, and his research into
early radios, the physical environment, and the minutiae of natural history truly shines.
The Beauties of Blackbirds in the Classroom:
Review of One Blackbird at a Time
by Wendy Barker
Reviewed by Cyra S. Dumitru
Wendy Barker, founding faculty member
of the Creative Writing Program at UTSA
and college professor for 34 years, is also
a nationally-recognized poet who has received yet another award: the 2015 John
Ciardi Prize for Poetry for her collection
entitled One Blackbird at a Time. Published by BkMk Press at the University of
Missouri-Kansas City, this beautifully designed collection transports us into the college classroom. Through these poems, the intersection between
literature and human beings who reckon with complicated, sometimes tragic lives comes alive. Through these poems we observe
and overhear the interactions that evolve among devoted professor of literature, undergraduates, and graduate students searching
for meaning, and the provocative, humanizing texts themselves.
What emerges are tapestries: the poems as singing tapestries.
Each poem is woven from narrative, lyrical, and philosophical
threads. Narrative threads work on two levels: references to characters and plots of novels under discussion or images from poems,
as well as glimpses of the private lives of professor and students.
Constantly intriguing are bits of remembered dialogue as students
respond directly to various texts. It is a testimony to Barker’s respect for her students that so many details about real students (with
names changed) provide fundamental texture. Clearly, in Barker’s
classroom, the students’ relationships with texts serve as core of
conversation, rather than the professor’s official interpretation.
Lyricism arises from Barker’s flexible diction and fluid sweep
of long lines, long sentences. (Visually the long sweeping lines
evoke the image of a threaded loom.) Scanning the contents
page, a reader discovers the sonic as well as narrative pleasures
of titles such as: “His Eyelashes Are Not Tarantulas,” “Waking
Over Call It Sleep,” “Whenever We’ve Dipped into Walden,”
and “Teaching ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ the 30th Time.” Barker
Voices de la Luna, 15 February 2016
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