Word: martel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Yann Martel's inspired novel Life of Pi is at its core a record of survival?and quite a record it is. Martel's protagonist, a 16-year-old Indian boy named Pi Patel, not only endures 227 days in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but does so while sharing a lifeboat with a 200-kilogram tiger, which regards his shipmate as a tasty sea ration. More than mere physical endurance, however, Life of Pi is concerned with the difficult perseverance of the human spirit. The tiger is a threat to Pi's body, but then becomes...
...Martel, a French-Canadian writer of gentle wit, lets Pi tell his own story in an engaging voice, starting with a wondrous childhood in Pondicherry, India, as the son of zoo owners. In his adolescence, Pi becomes promiscuously religious: he decides he wants to be Hindu, Muslim and Christian, devoutly and simultaneously. His pandit, his imam and his priest are less than pleased. Pi doesn't see the problem. Gandhi, he reminds them, said "all religions are true," and as for himself, he says, "I just want to love...
...Bengal tigers in lifeboats and Indian boys who worship Allah, Jesus and Hindu gods could easily become precious, but Martel saves his novel from saccharine whimsy by grounding it in hard reality. He doesn't stint on the bloody details of a tiger's diet, or the immense physical suffering Pi is forced to endure. Martel has done his homework: if a tiger and an Indian boy found themselves floating in the Pacific, this is how each would respond. Most importantly, Martel doesn't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing his tiger. Richard Parker is an animal and a killer...
...Martel says that Giles and the editors under his supervision assigned reporters soft news when there was more weighty news that should have been covered...
...worse than any of the other Gannett editors," Martel says. "He was very respected within Gannett. I'd be hard-put to say that Giles did [what he did] because of his own policies, but you didn't see him raising a lot of red flags or stamping his feet when Gannett was imposing these cookie cutter approaches to journalism...