Word: splendid
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...Sizing Up Blair's Legacy Michael Elliott overlooked one crucial point in summing up Blair's legacy: his lack of enthusiasm for a unified Europe [May 14]. Blair adhered to the conservative ideal of splendid isolation, obstructing constructive ideas for bringing European countries together. His position helped create a Europe in crisis, searching for its identity as the constitution was rejected. So while I am sad to see Blair go, I am sad mostly for what he could have been: a founding father of a secular, democratic and prosperous union of European peoples. It was not to be. Steve Maertens...
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...
...Thousand Splendid Suns probably won't be as commercially successful as Hosseini's first novel, but it is, to put it baldly, a better book. Where The Kite Runner told an appealing but somewhat programmatic tale of redemption, Suns is a dense, rich, pressure-packed guide to enduring the unendurable. (Though there's still plenty of action: "I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader," Hosseini admits.) Where the characters in The Kite Runner ran heavily to unredeemable sinners and spotless saints, in Suns the characters are more complex and paradoxical--more human...
...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