Just one criticism: The diversity on display does not extend to stories of minorities, which, considering all the talent out...
A rich, dense collection of 20 stories—King has harvested a bumper crop.
Auchincloss, Barth, Beattie, Boyle…the alphabetical order bunches together some big names at the start. The first three stories are entertaining and quirky, but T.C. Boyle’s “Balto” really hits paydirt. In this marvelous cliffhanger, about the forging of character, a 12-year-old girl can protect her beloved father if she lies under oath. What will she decide? Other family dramas also have real bite. The renowned Canadian Alice Munro explores intrepidly the aftermath of murder (“Dimension”). A deranged father has killed his three small children; his stoic, baffled wife visits him in the insane asylum; later, through his letters, she enters his twilit world, still reluctantly bound to him. The late Beverly Jensen looks at a large, loving, quarrelsome family (“Wake”). The head of the family has died. His children drive him through an ice storm to his burial in a remote Canadian village, where festive mourners greet the hearse in an extraordinary tableau. That boisterous affection for the dead is offset by two moving but unsentimental accounts of tenderness toward the dying (Stellar Kim’s “Findings and Impressions” and Eileen Pollack’s “The Bris”). Surrealism is represented by Karen Russell’s assimilation fable (“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”) and Roy Kesey’s airport nightmare (“Wait”), while Bruce McAllister’s searing story about the crisis of conscience experienced by a CIA covert-ops guy who spreads plagues in left-wing Third World countries is a memorable example of speculative fiction (“The Boy in Zaquitos”). Also noteworthy are Richard Russo’s “Horseman,” an intriguing campus story that’s a subtle illustration of the saying that good teachers teach themselves, and Joseph Epstein’s “My Brother Eli,” a juicy if superficial portrait of the artist (a thinly disguised Saul Bellow) as a bastard.
Just one criticism: The diversity on display does not extend to stories of minorities, which, considering all the talent out there, is troubling.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-618-71347-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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