Larger	Ellis Island and Other Stories Author: Mark Helprin
	Book Information Publisher: Harvest Books Book Type: Paperback Rating: 5 ISBN-13: 9780156283151 - ISBN-10: 0156283158 Publication Date: 5/31/1991 Pages: 204 Book Reviews

Marshall Pearl is orphaned at birth aboard an illegal immigrant ship off the coast of Palestine in 1947 and brought as an infant to America. Determined to see the world in its beauty, ferocity, and ultimate justice, he does so, in scenes of gorgeous color and great excitement, as a child in the Hudson Valley, fighting the Rastafarians in Jamaica, at Harvard, in a slaughterhouse on the Great Plains, in the Mexican desert, on the sea, and in the Alps. Finally, he is drawn to Israel to confront the logic of his birth in a crucible of war, magic, suffering, and grace. At the opening of the book, he is one of the dying wounded being transported to Haifa during the 1973 War. We follow him as he dreams, reconstructing his life, until, by the strength of what he has learned, suffered, and hoped, Marshall Pearl rises.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award and nominee for both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the american Book Award, these ten stories and the celebrated title novella are “beyond compare...[Helprin’s] imagination should be protected by some intellectual equivalent of the National Park Service” (Philadelphia Inquirer).