Word: splendid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Hosseini can't change his good fortune, but he did come back from Afghanistan with a remarkable new novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (Riverhead; 372 pages), about the lives of those who stayed behind. It is, in its own way, a kind of redemption...
...stories like that that made Hosseini realize he had to write A Thousand Splendid Suns. Unlike The Kite Runner, it has no scenes set in America. This is a book about Afghans in Afghanistan, covering the past 30-plus years of Afghan history almost month by month. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy playboy, forced into a loveless marriage to the boorish shoemaker Rasheed. Childless, the couple adopts 14-year-old Laila, who was orphaned by a rocket attack. Rasheed proceeds to take Laila as a second wife. Confined to a single claustrophobic household, beaten and denied love...
...Winner of Races-and Hearts Zoher abdoolcarim's essay on the retirement of the racehorse Silent Witness was a poignant ode to an obviously splendid beast [Feb. 19]. Having never heard of this particular animal, I was doubly moved by the prose of the author and the wonder that Silent Witness must have elicited from admiring crowds. Much as poverty and despair prevail on earth, it is satisfying to see that animals are sometimes recognized for the unknowing yet vast reach they have on us. Karl Germann Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa
...probably never saw Silent Witness race in the flesh, and may not have caught him on TV either. For his home was not the dirt tracks of the U.S. or the impossibly green paddocks of Britain and Ireland, but a splendid racing complex set amid skyscrapers in Hong Kong's Sha Tin New Town. To the folk of Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of China, Silent Witness was a hero; to true followers of the turf, worldwide, a legend. Now, put to pasture, he deserves to be known for who he really...
...afford to lose its way. The question of its survival is involved. Arthur Hertzberg, a vice president of the World Jewish Congress, believes something began to go wrong for Israel at the moment of its greatest triumph, the Six-Day War. He argues that while the 1967 victory was splendid for the Jewish ego, in Israel and in the Diaspora, the demonstration of such brilliant power, whatever advantages it brought, eventually led down a path of aggressiveness and grandiosity. After the Six-Day War, Ben-Gurion, then in retirement, warned Israel that it should give back all the captured territories...