Book Review: The Good Earth

I should know better than to let days pass without writing up my review of a book. With everything going on in my life, my listen to the audiobook version of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth is a faded memory. I'm ready to give up on modern fiction in audio form from my library. It is inevitably full of garbage. Indeed, perhaps that is half the battle with writing this review. I started and set aside two other audio books.

Listening to The Good Earth brought to mind an old favorite movie, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. If you have never seen this 1958 movie, it is well worth finding. It stars Ingrid Bergman as the missionary woman, Gladys Aylward. My parents had this movie on an old video disc (you have to be really old to remember video disc machines - the precursor to VHS). We watched it often. Indeed, Gladys Aylward's biography, The Small Woman, was the last book my mother was reading when her dementia took hold.

Pearl S. Buck's tale is of an Asian man tied to the land he tills. He begins as a peasant and rises to wealth. I read this book in high school, but had no memory of the main character's sexual profligacy. Since it is a classic, and his taking a prostitute into his home occurs midway through the tale, I stuck with it through the end. The writing is very good and in keeping with its status as a classic. Still, if you want a story about the Far East, you might do better to stick with The Small Woman or The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.