- #Magnifying glass in the pearl john steinbeck how to#
- #Magnifying glass in the pearl john steinbeck trial#
But what proved the most enthralling feature of the treasure was the fact that this noble object was obviously carved from one perfectly flawless piece of milky-pink jade. The figure was approximately nine inches tall, and was posed resting on its knees in the fashion of a camel or llama. From the presence of knobbed horns, I presumed the long-necked creature to be a stylized Asian representation of a giraffe. The first sight of this treasure took my breath away. "The past may indeed be prologue, but it is the future that invariably answers the questions of history."Īs for those missing artifacts, the mystery lingers, right up to the end of this graceful debut novel. "It is to those intrepid Chinese fishermen and farmers of Monterey that I owe the inspiration of this historical flight of possibilities," he writes in the book's prologue. His characters are predecessors of the Chinese he knew well from his California childhood in Monterey, people who impressed him with their sense of history and duty to their ancestors. The story is intriguing and well-told the artifacts are believed to have been buried in the early 1400s, almost a century before Columbus arrived on our shores but it's Steinbeck's respect for turn-of-the-century Chinese immigrants that shines through.
#Magnifying glass in the pearl john steinbeck how to#
As he offers Kino the magnifying glass and demonstrates how to use it, Kino, who has no experience.
#Magnifying glass in the pearl john steinbeck trial#
It's both a history lesson and a mystery novel, revolving around a 1906 discovery and subsequent disappearance of two ancient jade Chinese artifacts, buried for centuries under a majestic cypress and unearthed through a natural disaster.Īlmost 100 years later, a quirky young American scientist unearths new evidence of this incredible discovery and its mysterious disappearance, assembling a group of explorers to resume the search, this time in the ocean's depths. Start Free Trial Study Guide Questions & Answers Lesson Plans. Steinbeck, author of D own to a Soundless Sea, a collection of seven short stories, returns with his first novel, In the Shadow of the Cypress, also set on the rugged California coast of Monterey and Big Sur. Most people who had the literary giant John Steinbeck as a father would choose a profession other than writing.