The modern resurgence of the black death animates Hillerman's 14th tale featuring retired widower Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee. Bubonic plague has survived for centuries in the prairie-dog villages of the Southwest, where its continuing adaptation to modern antibiotics has increased its potential for mass destruction. Leaphorn is hired by a wealthy Santa Fe woman to search for her granddaughter, biologist Catherine Pollard, who has disappeared during her field work as a "flea catcher," collecting plague-carrying specimens from desert rodents.
Features critical essays reflecting a variety of schools of criticism; notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index; and, an introductory essay by Harold Bloom.
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle not only drew attention from the likes of Winston Churchill and President Theodore Roosevelt—it drew action. The novel's depiction of what takes place in a meat-processing plant pressed the U.S. government into taking steps to regulate the industry. Examine the work with this text.
The Joy Luck Club - Modern Critical Interpretations
With the publication of her first novel in 1989, The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan was immediately recognized as a major contemporary novelist. Her work has received a great deal of attention and acclaim from feminist critics, and is very much concerned with issues of matrilineage and the ultimate triumphant over female victimization.
In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved.
