Customer Reviews

Jabez

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David McKie, who writes a column called "Elsewhere" for The Guardian (UK), is a writer of great wit, style, and substance. His is a stylishness without tics or pretensions. In "Jabez" he tells the story of a Victorian-era rogue whose monetary shenanigans caused many pious English folk, having lost their savings, to face a desperate future--indeed, leading some to commit suicide. As an added bonus to the book's insights into the Victorian age, because of Jabez's flight to Argentina to avoid prosecution, the reader is offered a view of late nineteenth-century life in that South American country, specifically in the northwestern province of Salta, in the shadows of the Andes.