The Pearl: A Review

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THE PEARL: A Review

The Pearl is a story about an Mexican Indian man and woman, set in the early to mid-1900's, in Bolivia. It was written by John Steinbeck as a short fiction book that tells of the family's life just before, during, and just after find a great pearl. The book was an amazing and discussed many different ideas. The main idea discussed is whether or not being rich is a good thing. The story explained how everyone would like to be rich yet being rich has a lot of unnecessary baggage that goes with it.

There are two major characters in this book. The first is a man named Kino. He is a Mexican Indian of about 25-30 years. He lives in a fairly primitive village among a similar group of Mexican Indians. They are a fishing village and also dive for pearls. The second character is a woman named Juana. She is his commonlaw wife, mother of his son, and better half. She supports everything
Kino does, and offers advice to him whenever he needs it. They have a son named
Coyotito who plays a minor role in the book but a very major part in their lives.
The book starts with Coyotito getting bit my a scorpion. The families needs to see a doctor but the doctor won't see them because they have no money. Kino decides to go pearl hunting in an attempt to get some money. He dives and, after removing some shells, catches a glimpse of something shiny out of the corner of his eye. He removes the oyster that he saw the gleam from, and returns to the surface. Inside the oyster he finds a huge pearl that becomes known as, the Pearl of the World. Almost immediately there after, people try to steal it. The doctor tries to steal it after giving the baby a medicine to make it seem ill, however Kino wakes up and chases him away. The next morning, he goes to town to try and sell the pearl but the prices he gets offered, he feels, are to low. That night he gets attacked several more times and ends up killing a man. The family is forced to flee after their house is burned down and their floor is dug up. They cover their tracks very well but Kino notices a trio of trackers following them. The family tries to outrun the trackers but they cannot escape them. Kino finds some caves that they cannot me traced into and decides to hide the family in there. He realizes that, in order to survive, he must kill the trackers. While Kino gets in position to make his attack, the baby begin...

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...to make the book a little bit better, I would like him to elaborate more on situations like when Kino is at the pearl buyer. He describes it very well from Kino's point of view, but I would like to know what the pearl buyer was thinking. There were indications of how impressed the pearl buyer was, but you had to guess at what they really meant. I agree with the author's theme and the way he showed it. Money is not everything its cracked up to be. Its nice to be able to have anything you want but there's always people trying to take that money away from you. If all people were honest, I believe much less people would be rich but that's another story. Kino was very honest and because he was, people tried to cheat him out of his riches. He had to fight against the entire corrupted system, in order to begin to achieve what he wanted, and all that did was get him in more trouble. There are very few people who can successful maintain a rich status through honesty. This is only in the monetary status though, many people, including Kino, are rich in life. This is the best type of richness and usually, monetary rich people are very poor in life. Kino was rich even though he didn't know it.

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