Word: spicing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...talents toward fiction, most reporters?particularly foreign correspondents?are undermined by the very expertise that lends authority to their dispatches. Rather than creating flesh-and-blood characters, they often produce stick figures representing various factions and points of view, who hold forth in preachy, predictable allegories. Yet in The Spice Garden, his debut novel, Michael Vatikiotis, editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, has constructed an engrossing narrative of mass hysteria and mob violence set in the Maluku archipelago, Indonesia's spice islands, during the horrific bloodbath that swept across the area...
...Spice Garden should be notable, if for no other reason, as the first serious novel in English about the sectarian violence in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto. Vatikiotis solves one of the main problems facing the journalist-novelist by cutting himself free from actual events and creating an imaginary spice island he names Noli. He even invents for it a spice?"a hairy nut the size of a plum that stubbornly refused to grow anywhere else...
...plot of The Spice Garden revolves around the friendship between the leaders of the island's two communities: Father Xavier Lunas, a Catholic priest, and Ghani, a Falstaffian hotelier and fish merchant. At the beginning of the novel, a wedding is being planned between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl. The social cataclysms that have begun to rack Indonesia are felt here only as faraway echoes, until a boatload of survivors of gruesome atrocities in strife-torn Ambon, the capital of Maluku, washes up on Noli's shores. Soon afterward, a gang of jihadist rabble-rousers arrives, with...
...Playmates gave way to the buffed and sanded ladies of the workout era. They were usually, though not necessarily, busty, and almost always Caucasian. And always very American: the ideal of the middle-class Midwestern boy who ran the magazine. Even the German models Hefner added for spice in 1961 (Heidi Becker, Christa Speck) looked like red-white-and-blue farm girls...
...arrives bearing takeout from Spice, is an extroverted personality who has decided to protect himself from the snow in layers of cashmere sweaters rather than a jacket. He encourages an auditioner stricken with a tickly throat: “Can you carry a tune? You’ll be fine...