The Nature of Things

I read People of the Book in May, 2009 and reviewed the book for Goodreads. Here is that review. ~~~~~ People of the Book by Geraldine  Brooks My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is based on the compelling true story of the survival of the Sarajevo haggadah over the five hundred years of its existence.  Many times during that existence, it had been in danger of extermination, even as the people that it served were also in such danger.  That it has survived more or less intact may well be thought of as a miracle ore even a series of miracles. The story here is of a conservator of ancient texts, Hanna Heath, and it follows her efforts to restore the book in the war-torn Sarajevo of 1996 and of her research into the history of the book as she tries to imagine how it could have survived for so long.  It is a story that should have grabbed me and held my interest, and yet it left me curiously unmoved.  I just couldn't seem to work up much empathy for Hanna and her tr...

Geraldine Brooks has a knack for taking a tiny thread of true historical fact and weaving it into a fine and intricate pattern that gives a clear picture, though fictional, of the period about which she is writing. She's done it again with  Caleb's Crossing . In this case, the slender thread is the graduation from Harvard in 1665 of its first Native American student, a member of the Wampanoag tribe from Martha's Vineyard. Brooks has imagined a biography  for that young man that vividly explores what life was like for both the Puritans and the Native American tribes on the islands off Massachusetts in that period. The story is told through the voice of Bethia Mayfield, daughter of a minister, a good man who does his best to live his hard faith and to bring a healing message of salvation to the tribes. When we meet Bethia, she is a young girl, living with her father and mother and her older brother. Theirs is a hard life and Death constantly sits on their shoulders. One after...