Customer Reviews

The Good Earth

5 star:		(93)
4 star:		(49)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Published in 1931, this story is set in rural, pre-revolution China. Author Pearl S. Buck was born in the United States but moved with her family to China while she was still an infant. She lived most of her first forty years in China.

This book tells the story of a poor farmer named Wang Lung. He wants to marry, yet doesn't have to money for a match maker. His father goes to the local wealthy family, the House of Hwang, and asks for a slave to be the wife for his son.

From his wedding day forward, the fortunes of Wang and his new wife O-Lan change, mostly for the better. Not only does O-Lan run the house most efficiently, she also helps with the old father and with the farming. Two sets of hands in the fields lead to increased crop yields and money.

As I was listening to this audio book, I wondered if Mrs. Buck had accurately presented the lives of farmers in China at that time. Several reviews that I checked confirm my impressions.

Spoiler Alert

The other thing that struck me about this book was how the author was able to portray the desperation of the people during the various hardships. The stoic acceptance by O-Lan of the death of her second daughter, born during the drought. I couldn't imagine what Wang went through when he took his newborn daughter from O-Lan, knowing that he would have to let her die so the rest of them could survive, but I could feel his anguish.

Alert Over

I loved this book. It didn't matter that it was published almost 80 years ago. It still came across as fresh material and still relevant. There are still many areas of this world where people farm and try to eke out a living.

Blackstone Audio produced this audio book in 2007. It was read by Anthony Heald. Mr. Heald has a very enjoyable reading voice and it added to my enjoyment.

I read this book years ago and it has stayed with me ever since.
Originally published in 1931, it won the Pulitzer prize the following year.

The setting is in China, right before the revolution. Wang Lung is a poor farmer in a village and the book starts with his wedding to plain O-lan. They have four children together, three boys and one girl. He is a very hard working farmer and bit by bit, thanks also to O-lan's skills, he builds a fortune by buying land from the House of Hwangs's family, landowners in a nearest village whose wealth declines dramatically due to their relentless spending.

We are dipped into Chinese culture, taken from the seemingly bottomless poverty of the early days throughout the rise to wealth, only to be propelled downwards again due to a terrible draught and subsequent famine, when everything seems lost and the family has to move to the city, starting all over again.

We are reading spectators of the rise and fall and twists & turns of Wang Lung's family. Many touching episodes have moved me throughout the book, especially the ones connected with hard-working, silent, subservient O-lan and later on, the ones related to their mentally retarded baby girl.

The story is absorbing and mesmerizing, exquisitely written. Page after page, truly unforgettable. A must-read classic.

The Good Earth was a summer reading book for me. The story revolves around a Chinese farmer who goes from being a poor farmer to a rich gentleman. he goes through different joys and threats throughout his life...from famine to spoiling his children. The book was actually interesting. It kept me reading to the end. I would say it is a book for ages 14+ because it includes sexual situations and some of it was simply not meant for an elementary schooler.

what a book really is, what it really does until I read THE GOOD EARTH. Surely somewhere back in high school I'd combed over it along with the other books on the list, but this time, with a little living behind me, I could appreciate it, accepting its gifts. The first gift was the reminder that a book is not a movie on the page. Even with our short attention spans gorged on TV and computers (myself included) and our starved imaginations, taking the time to think through a book like this raises the mind from its slumber. An ordinary tale of a Chinese peasant who goes from a poor farmer purchasing a slave from a rich man to a rich man himself, THE GOOD EARTH, shows the cycles of mankind with all their rejoicing and regrets. There are no contrived right turns or easy wrap-ups, neither for the land-thirsty Wang Lung or the reader who follows his journey. I think I will spend this summer revisting my high school AP reading list and be much better for it.

"The Good Earth" is tragic and makes you feel good about yourself and what you have. Pearl S. Buck wrote Wang Lung, in opinion, as a man who started out as a simple man, but became a selfish man who didn't want to worry himself over anything. In doing so, it severed his family. I became disgusted with him when he took in Lotus, and was tempted to stop reading the book. But, I had gone that far, so I went further. His sleeping with Pear Blossom made me nauseous. I don't know if I'll read the rest of the trilogy, but this book was interesting, nonetheless. I recommend.

It must be admitted that I read this book for my high school Sophomore Honors English class, and that I had heard mixed reviews. Thus, I began reading this book without any expectations. However much my classmates incessantly wine about their hatred for "classics," I tend to love them. THE GOOD EARTH proved no exception.
However, I did find the Introduction to this edition quite misleading. I read it before starting the book itself, and it prepared me for something which the book did not deliver, in my opinion. The Introduction claimed that Pearl S. Buck had, with this book, dispelled myths and stereotypes surrounding the Chinese culture and history. However, I found, especially in the opening of THE GOOD EARTH, that she did just the opposite. Portraying Chinese women as close-minded and simple through her heart-rendering character O-lan and in some ways making the male main character, Wang Lung, seem stupid and naive only built upon the pre-conceived stereotypes many Westerners are thought to have toward the Chinese.
While I do understand that, with this book, Pearl S. Buck attempted to portray the Chinese people as normal humans dealing with the same hardships and triumphs as everyone else, it is also my personal opinion that she went a bit too far in this endeavor.
It also must be taken into account, though, that Pearl Buck wrote this book when ignorance about Asia and its people was perhaps more acute than it is today, and in some ways those far removed from the Chinese culture probably did learn something about the people and their ways of life. In this, Buck has certainly triumphed.
And despite the Introduction which I view as being misleading, I did find this book rich in some aspects of history as well as fulfilling and wise. I viewed THE GOOD EARTH as a parable, and thus as a fully-developed story in which one can find little pearls of knowledge as well as insight into the Chinese culture.
This said, I truly enjoyed THE GOOD EARTH and would recommend it to anyone. The characters, as the book goes on, become more well-developed and do not appear as simple as they did in the opening of the book. The hardships of pre-revolutionary China are subtly revealed, while readers become familiar with the lives of an ordinary, hard-working Chinese man and his family.
At times, Buck's characters infuriated me, at times they made me cry, and I even experienced a few bouts of laughter while reading THE GOOD EARTH.
In summation, I feel that THE GOOD EARTH is a classic for a reason. Of course, it is flawed, but it also affords its readers great insight into the culture and history of the Chinese people and is additionally a wonderful, wise, and poignant story.

Pearl S. Buck's novel of China at the turn of the 20th century, seen through the eyes of one peasant family, is a masterpiece of contemporary literature. It's the rags-to-riches story of Wang Lung, a subsistence farmer whose aged father purchases a wife for him to bring him children to carry on the family line. The old man finds him a wife who spent her childhood as a servant in a rich house. O-lan was too homely to be raped by the rich master or his sons, but her virginity is prized by the old man and Wang Lung. She is the perfect wife for the younger man, hardworking, self-denying, bearing him children with clockwork regularity. For a few years, the family prospers. But a peasant farmer is always at the mercy of the elements, and a disastrous drought sends them south to beg in the streets for their survival. A chance find of a rich man's hidden treasure by O-lan means not only their salvation, but the end of poverty. Wang Lung brings his family home to prosperity and buys more land to consolidate his wealth; eventually, he owns the house and land of the same wealthy man who sold him O-lan.

But as Wang Lung's fortunes prosper, he undergoes an insidious transformation. A rich man like him has no need for an ugly peasant wife like O-lan. He buys himself a concubine and sets her up in his house. Ashamed of his own illiteracy, he sends his sons to school. They grow up rich and spoiled, and take rich, spoiled wives. The sons don't want to work on the land; they look down their noses at the peasant class they came from. The family moves into the big house the rich man used to live in, and to the discomfiture and resentment of the villagers, Wang Lung becomes every day more like the rich man he so resented when he was poor himself, despising the unwashed masses. It is only as he grows old that Wang Lung's ties to the land assert themselves above everything else; his sole wish is to die in his father's home on the farm he grew up in. It's the curse of his life that his sons are indifferent to the land he loves.

Pearl Buck was raised in China and her love of the land and its people is evident throughout the book. Through her story of Wang Lung and his family we see the beginnings of the transformation of China from an agricultural to an industrial society and the profound changes this will bring on the country and its society. She continued the story through two sequels, but neither has the simple power and brilliance of the first. "The Good Earth" is her finest book.

¡§The Good Earth¡ is a classic book people definitely from all ages have to read. The language isn¡t too complicated to understand, but Pearl Buck uses vivid details and descriptions to inform the reader the entire life of the main character, Wang Lung. Through this book, Pearl Buck takes you into another dimension, back in time while China was encountering the Boxers Rebellion. She reveals to you the pain and agony the majority of the population were experiencing. The book portrays the life of Wang Lung, the protagonist of the book. He is a peasant farmer, who goes through the stages of affluence and property. From a well-off farmer with a few properties, to being forced to leave his hometown with nothing but his cow and family. Forced to start a new living in another area, he strives to support his children and wife with a new job. The family worked together to rebuild their lives, as they gradually found prosperity through the pre-revolutionary China in the 1920s. In the end, Wang Lung buys more property from the house of Hwang, where his loyal wife, O-lan used to work in. Their family has finally come back on track, and climbed all the way to the top, with children well educated, and wealthy.
Reading this book allows me to feel very relaxed because it doesn¡t make me feel as if it is another school-required, tedious, book; with incomprehensible language that always requires a dictionary at hand. It allows the reader to comprehend a different culture people hundreds of years ago lived like. I enjoyed this book greatly, and recommend to all readers who are patient enough for one excellent detailed story. In addition, readers who long for a meaningful, relaxing, educational, detailed, and exciting book to read.

I'll be the first to admit, the premise of this book is not the most appealing. The life of a struggling peasant farmer in rural China during the turn of the century did not strike me as being a page turner. But Pearl S. Buck made me a fan after the first twenty pages and I could not put it down. At the urgings of my friends who knew that I was a fan of historical fiction I picked this one up. The story is thoughtful, told with compassion, and surprisingly fast paced. The characters are fascinating and are the main element that kept me reading. The unconventional protagonist is Wang Lung. A very self aware and sincere farmer whose story is told in third person but soley from his point of view. He marries a slave girl, O-lan, from the nearby village. They come to love each other not with passion, but with unspoken admiration and respect. Whats more is that they both earn the respect of the reader. O-lan clearly lives a hard life and has been given a bad hand, even sometimes at Wang Lungs doing, but it is hard to see her as a victim becuase does not see herself as one.
Before finishing this book I became so sure that I liked the authors work that I bought Pavillion of Women. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that this was a Pulitzer prize winner over seventy years ago. Obtusely dismissing those books as stuffy and pretentious, I now look forward to reading those as well. Especially if they are written with such earnestness as this fine fable.

Having heard that Ms. Buck spent most of her life in China, I began reading The Good Earth expecting an authentic, albeit fictional, portrayal of life in China in the early 1900s. The first half of the story begins in this way. Protagonist Wang Lung, in his early years of marriage and family life, represents the honest, hard-working farming peasant immersed in a man vs. nature struggle for existence and, to a lesser extent, a man vs. society challenge of social positioning. Through Wang and his wife, O-lan's, courage and strife, we see a society of contrasts: simplicity of rural life vs. luxury of city life in turn-of-the-century China, years of abundant harvests vs. occasions of widespread famine, traditional roles favoring men over women, rich landowning "great houses" vs. poor laborers and slaves, Confucian work ethic vs. idleness.

About halfway through the novel, there is a transition in both literary style and thematic content. Once Wang Lung rises to wealth, his problems become more complex. Behind the story's events, the grand themes of literature rapidly unfold: inner turmoil in relationships between men and women, husband and wife, and father, sons and grandchildren; one's destiny and duty vs. the sense of freedom that wealth and achievement bring; emotional and generational conflicts resulting from changing social values in a modernizing world; lifelong friendship and the loneliness in old age. By the end of the novel, with traditional Wang ever so fervently tied to his land while his forward-looking sons devise to sell it, the simple story about a Chinese peasant's life has fully blossomed into an epic tale about real people having truly universal appeal.

What I find most remarkable about the book is the author's presentation of the human predicament in an artistic, literary way through the ebb and flow of events in the life of our protagonist, without pausing to probe deliberately into his psychology, motivations and emotions. The character's actions and events in the novel speak for themselves and display both the author's keen understanding of human nature and her exceptional talent in painting with words a beautiful, realistic picture of human feelings and relationships.

One caveat concerning the novel is its controversial believability as a true depiction of life in China a century ago. I come away from the book certain that I have learned something about China and its culture but sensing that literary license has played a larger role in the book's creation than the author would readily acknowledge or even be aware of. In this sense, I judge the work to be more a masterpiece of realistic world fiction than a firmly grounded Chinese historical novel.