"The Good Earth" is set at the beginning of the 20th century in rural China. It's protagonist is a poor young farmer named Wang Lung, whose parents have arranged for him to marry a 20-year-old slave named O-lan.
Used to back-breaking work, O-lan makes a wife who aims to please her new husband in every way. He holds on to many of the traditions of the past, and particularly to the custom of foot binding. O-lan gives her husband a son and then another. By all practical accounts, Wang Lung should be happy and satisfied.
Over the years, the wealthy and powerful Hwang family, who had been O-lan's owners, experiences their own successes and failures. They spend far too much money and the wife is addicted to opium, another costly and decadent habit. To raise funds, they sell some of their lands to Wang Lung, whose wife has helped him manage their own household more wisely.
"The Good Earth" follows these two families over the coming years and decades and the listener is caught up in the characters, the epic events based on authentic historical events and in the timeless themes of greed, pride and the rise and fall of families, as well as the struggle to maintain time-honored traditions against an ever growing push to achieve in a modern world.
Pearl S. Buck was born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia. She spent her childhood in China with her missionary parents. Although she attended Randolph-Macon Woman's College in the United States, she returned to China and lived many more years with its people.
Buck wrote a number of novels, including East Wind, West Wind. Sons, and A House Divided. The Good Earth, published in 1931, was her second book.
The Good Earth spent many months on the New York Times Bestseller List, as well as other, best-seller lists. It earned Buck the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal, in addition to a later Nobel Prize for Literature.
"the book sees the promotion,or some may consider the moral degradation of Wang-Lung from a poor humble farmer to a wealthy landowner,the kind he himself used to hate in his early years. the writer has done a terrific job in portraying the characters beautifully.It shows how girls were considered nothing but slaves and wives were only means of satisfying hunger for sex;all that leaves us thinking about how much society has changed today. Wang Lung glorified the land he owned,more than anything,even his kids showing his greed and his submissive first wife having blind faith on him showing her loyalty. his kids grow up to forget how pathetic their childhood was and these disrespectful brats start fighting over the property of their father. all in all,nice book,a must read from my end. leaves your eyes wet with a glimpse of smile in the corner of your lips :) loved it Pearl S. Buck"
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Debarati (5 out of 5 stars)