The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

This is a collection of the exciting adventures of the main character, Tom Sawyer. At the beginning of the book, we learn about the boy Tom Sawyer, a cunning and mischievous character on one side, and a decent and lovable one on the other. He lived with his aunt, an aging woman with a soft heart. Then as the book progresses, Tom involved himself in one big adventure, along with the character Huckleberry Finn, which is carried on to the end through a succession of short stories.

This big adventure began when Tom and Huckleberry take a daring visit to the local cemetery at midnight. Here both boys witness a murder, and also vow never to say a word about it—since the criminal was a notorious, vicious fellow. Next to come Tom and Huck decide to go treasure hunting, and they eventually got into a real trail. Tom and Huck, and another boy, go pirating in an uninhabited nearby island, and back at the village they were declared as dead. Getting back to the village there was a party for one of Tom’s classmates, and the excitement built up to the point of Tom and this classmate of his almost starving inside a mountainous cave. All these stories had their ups and downs, their climaxes and their conclusions, but one thing for sure is that they were all very interesting and exciting.

The book is a combination of loosely-related short stories, each story having its own special moral. But after reading the book one moral stuck in my mind more conspicuously: To get somebody interested in something you must make that thing seem hard to get. This is about a story at the beginning of the book. Tom was given the punishment of whitewashing the front gates of their house. He considered this an arduous and disparaging task—his friends would tease him since they didn’t have to work. But Tom, as always, developed a bright idea, which worked more than perfectly on each of his friends that came by.

April 20, 2015. Review initially written in 1982. Novel first published in 1949, this Longman edition being published in 1979. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

The Bride Price

The story is a revelation of Igbo cultural practices in the 1950s and ’60s as it affects women and children. It starts with an Igbo family in Lagos (a father with a leg injury sustained from World War II, a mother gone back to the village to visit the fertility goddess, an older girl and a younger boy both in primary school) then traces the plight of the family when the father suddenly dies in hospital: The burial ceremonies, how the death was kept from the wife, how the family had to relocate to the village, the mourning practices the woman had to go through in the village/town of Ibuza in the then Midwest State.

From then on the story concentrates on how the woman (Ma Blackie) was inherited by the brother-in-law (Okonkwo) and how this man planned to use the bride price for his daughters for political advancement, to become an Eze. Then there is the issue of slavery and how descendants of slaves were discriminated against across Igboland, and the irony of their becoming the first to be educated and advance in the new European system taking root. The educated daughter (Aku-nna) falls in love with her school teacher in the village (Chike) but because the school teacher’s ancestor was a slave Aku-nna’s step-father and in fact the whole village forbid her to marry into their family, their wealth notwithstanding. Instead of this, a “free” family abducts her into a forced marriage, not because their son loves the girl, but just to teach the so-called slave family (Ofulue) a lesson. Hating the situation, Aku-nna is able to delay forced consummation of the marriage. She is able to escape the village with Chike and they are happily settled in Ughelli.

But then the marriage to Chike had upturned the customs of the village, with the attendant consequences both real and imagined. Okonkwo refused to accept bride price from Ofulue for Aku-nna, and unable to achieve his political ambition, went out to kill the girl via ritualistic means, through the system of a bewitching doll. The girl herself knew the cultural belief of the people regarding nonpayment of bride price: The woman is supposed to die at childbirth. And for one reason or the other, this tragic end closed the story, after her child was born by Caesarean operation.

April 20, 2015. Review initially written in 2004. Novel first published in 1976. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

A Clergyman’s Daughter

Anyone who thinks white people are all rich, educated and saintly should read this book. It is a critical look at everyday life in rural England around the onset of the 20th Century. The key character is Dorothy, a 28-year-old only-daughter and child of a clergyman in a village-sort of place. Due to an emotional problem in her childhood she’s afraid of men and marriage and all of her time is spent serving her father and the church.

Mr Warburton is thrown in as a twist in the plot. He’s an old immoral bachelor always trying to seduce Dorothy. He manages to get Dorothy to his house one night but his attempt to seduce her fails again. After Dorothy gets home the same night she loses her memory and the next thing we know she’s on a street somewhere without a clue as to whom she is or what she is doing there. She joins the first set of people to speak to her, who happen to be homeless petty thieves, and spends the next weeks trekking with them, begging for money and food and sleeping under trees. This is followed by a life of hop-picking, looking for a job in an alien city of London and, not finding one, having to live in the streets with beggars and sleep at Trafalgar Square.

Back home her disappearance has been broadcast by an old lady rumor-monger as an elopement with Mr Warburton and her father has believed it and doesn’t want her back in shame. Then, through a little twist in the plot, she gets a job as a teacher at a little private school, and the search light switches to how low the quality in these schools could go and how owners’ primary interest was usually making money at the expense of the poor students, and how parents’ words were law since they paid the fees. Dorothy is shocked by the way the private school is run but as time goes by she painfully adjusts to her requirements, not wanting to go back to begging.

She does return home towards the end, and by then she’s changed into a new person. She’s lost her Christian faith, however not the fear of men, and turns down Warburton’s offer of marriage.

April 13, 2015. Review initially written in 1993. Novel first published in 1935. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

The Naked Gods

About the battle between the British and Americans for future influence in the premier university of a newly-independent African country. (They are the naked gods, trying to control the future of this country.) The Americans see the country as being strategically important in Africa and by maintaining an American-type educational system there, would be able to influence its people, while the British mainly wish to retain the British-type system since it is their former colony. The Americans have taken the initiative by pumping funds into the country and also for the founding of the school and have their man as its first vice-chancellor. The problem is who will replace him in three years’ time.

There are two candidates, one backed by the American VC, a younger man with an American doctorate degree (Okoro), and the other backed by the British, an older man with a British BA whom the Americans see as being slow (Ikin). A number of incidents take place: Okoro goes to a dibia for a protective ritual; an editorial in the major newspaper attacks the VC; a charm is found by a door in Ikin’s house. Okoro’s corrupt past and present activities slowly come out and the American ambassador advises the VC about his wrong choice. They decide to offer the post to Ikin after a year. But there are strings attached and Ikin rejects their offer. As a last resort, the Americans tell the local government that the VC will be replaced. The VC is angry but he realizes his hands are tied and he can’t retaliate.

April 13, 2015. Review initially written in 1992. Novel first published in 1970. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

Timeline

When a whiz kid CEO (Doniger) starts taking people’s lives for granted in the pursuit of business profits using a brand new technology his company is developing, he has to be taught a lesson and given a dose of his own medicine. This is one aspect of this story. The brand new technology is the ability to teletransport people using quantum mechanics principles and quantum computing, not just from one place to another, but from the present to any time period in the past and back. The idea is that time is not like a destination that you travel to, but all periods of time exist together in parallel universes, and all that is required is a way to cross from one to another.

This technology of moving between times has been in secret development by the firm for years, with animals and employees as guinea pigs. And when accidents happen with the test subjects, they get hushed up in the firm while improvements are devised: Accidents like not being reconstructed properly on the return phase, or the brain or nervous system being altered. When a curious professor and his assistants working indirectly for the firm are assured that the technology is absolutely safe, they are transported to a region of France 600 years back, into the Middle Ages of Europe, only right into a war. While they are battling for their own lives so as to get back to the present, the CEO is contemplating turning his back on them so they don’t return, as an explosive accident in the lab has caused loss of equipment and raised other issues.

But luckily, the Professor and two of his three assistants manage to get transported back, only for them to hear the whiz kid giving a presentation to business executives whose companies he wants to get further funding from, selling them the idea of cultural tourism into the past as a billion dollar new business frontier. One of his colleagues takes it upon himself to banish the whiz kid into the past to teach him a lesson. He is drugged and transported alone back to France of the 14th Century, during a period of The Black Plague.

April 4, 2015. Novel first published in 1999, this Ballantine Books edition being published in 2000, ISBN 0-345-41762-3.

Anthills of the Savannah

A contemporary political story of Nigeria of the 1980s, though referred to with the fictitious name of Kangan. It is a story of conscience, in which the key actors do a lot of soul searching and try to do the right thing. The country and place names are fictional, but the language, character names, food, local customs and type of government, not to mention the corrupt police, are definitely Nigerian.

It is the brief story of three friends and classmates who now find themselves in government by courtesy of a military coup. Sam is the military leader whom power is slowly corrupting. Chris is the information minister and Ike is the government-appointed editor of the national daily. As the struggle for power would have it, Ike was suspended from office for failing to worship the military leader and government’s policies, and then murdered by the secret police. Chris goes into hiding and gets crash lessons on living poor. As he is leaving the capital heading for a deeper hide-out, there is a military coup in which the military government is toppled. Chris is however thoughtlessly shot by a soldier amid celebrations on the road, just because he dared speak on behalf of a girl the soldier wanted to rape. It is then left for the girlfriends of Chris and Ike to pick up the pieces left by their men.

April 1, 2015. Review initially written in 1998. Novel first published in 1987 by Heinemann (African Writers Series). Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

The Bonfire of The Vanities

Interesting but funny tale of social and race relations in New York covering blacks and whites; Wasps, Donkeys (Irish), Italians, Jews; the rich in Wall Street with million-dollar homes on Fifth Avenue, the poor in the Bronx and the obstacles they face. Sherman McCoy and mistress Maria Ruskin represent the white rich, while Henry Lamb and Roland Auburn represent the struggling black poor, with reporter Fallow representing the paparazzi, exposing different aspects of the story as it develops—The fall of McCoy from grace to grass. Reverend Bacon is the mouthpiece of the black and Puerto Rican and other minorities, speaking out for justice, or so it seems.

It all starts from Sherman’s desire for beautiful exciting young flesh, forsaking his wife for the sexy Maria Ruskin, wife of a rich old man. It ends with his social and financial ruin as a result of litigation and protests following the injury and subsequent death of Henry Lamb after he was hit by Sherman’s car (driven by Maria) and they ran away rather than taking him to a hospital.

Along with race relations, the story takes swipes at the justice system, showing how it really works behind the scenes, with attorneys trading favors and making deals. And not left out is the social parties of the rich, how people conducted themselves there, how women referred to as social x-rays starved their bodies in a bid to look skinny, ending up looking like walking skeletons.

April 1, 2015. Review initially written in 2010. Novel first published in 1987 by Farrar, Straus & Ginoux; this Bantam Books edition being published in 1988, ISBN 0-553-27597-6.

Unbridled

This is the story of Ngozi Akachi, an Igbo girl from a village in Bendel (now Delta) State of Nigeria, born sometime in the late 70’s. Born in bad rainy weather that caused flooding and the disappearance of some kids, livestock and property, she looked light-skinned unlike the rest of the family. The villagers superstitiously blamed her birth for their loss and this probably led the father to decide that she was not his daughter, but a spirit-child. Under this belief he starts raping her at will when he could no longer control his sexual urges. This very act of incest was to be the source of shame and pain for the girl which she has to bear in silence for many years. Probably because his son Nnamdi and wife began to notice his assaults on the girl, the man decides to send her off to live with his brother in Lagos. This is the secret past that took the whole of the book to be revealed.

The story recounts how Ngozi fared in Lagos in the home of her uncle and aunt where she was treated more like a slave than family, and then expelled by the indignant aunt for having sex with a neighbor’s son. How she was taken in by two ‘independent’ women who ran a beauty salon. One of these women, Princess, had been lured to Italy by a cousin under fake pretences of getting her good work, only to find out that the work was that of a sex slave, and had managed to escape from the ring and get repatriated back home. Her decision to take in Ngozi was borne out of this experience as she’d been out in the streets too with nowhere to go when a kindly Italian woman found her and took her home. While living with Princess and Uloma, Ngozi discovers online dating and this led to James King, a white British guy who claimed he loved black people. Ngozi decides to leave Nigeria to be with James, if only this would make her forget her past. This was in 1997.

Getting to London though, she realizes right away that it was a big mistake. James was no rich gentleman with a house of his own, living instead in a flat he shared with two black men. One of the men, Providence, happened to be a Nigerian too. Rather than escaping Africa at last, Ngozi (now going by the easier-to-pronounce name of Erika on James’ insistence) was surprised to encounter Africa even in the UK. Her neighbor was a Ghanaian woman (Bessie) and there was no secrecy to be enjoyed in James’ shared flat. James took her British money and passport without telling her, treated her like sexual property, and for the next few months she lived under his total control and in fear of him. When she begins to get some confidence and have friends of her own, like the Ghanaian woman and even Providence himself, James gets jealous. He forbids her to relate with Bessie (which she could not abide with), and he kicks Providence out of the flat under the pretence he was raising a family. He finally marries Ngozi in a rush to further entrap her, but unlucky for him he starts treating her like a slave, and even physically assaulting her. And unlucky for him she is the one to receive the mail containing her British papers and passport when it arrives, which she hides from him. Armed with her legal papers and unable to put up with James’ mistreatment any more, she finally packs her bags and leaves, going to join Providence in Leicester. From then on things finally take a good turn for her. Providence loved her, was doing well in a flat of his own, and treated her with respect, eventually assisting her to file for divorce and then proposing to marry her.

It was at this point that the news of her father’s death arrived in an email from Princess. She decides to return to Nigeria to attend the funeral, but she was rather happy than sad that the man had finally died. She appears to recover from the trauma of the past as she begins telling people about it, beginning with Providence, in an “unbridled” sort of way. On arrival in Lagos she confronts her older brother Nnamdi, wondering how he could pretend not to have known what their dad did to her. And even after she told her aging mother, she realized the woman had also known all along. Then the unanswered question—why had she done nothing at the time?

March 29, 2015. Review initially written in 2007. Novel first published in 2007, this BlackSands Books edition having ISBN 978079396-8.