Knockabout journalist Dan Starkey leaves the mean streets of Belfast for a season of even more violent insanity in the world of professional boxing. Meet Bobby ``Fat Boy'' McMaster, the heavyweight champ of Ireland. Haven't heard of him? That's just the reason Bobby's mentor, Geordie McClean, needs to hire Starkey to do public relations for Bobby's upcoming world championship bout with Mike Tyson (!) and write a book about it all after the champ's given Bobby, a wee sweetie who reads novels and has a sly sense of humor, a decent burial in New York. It looks like a great chance for Starkey to make some money and get out of the war zone he covered so hilariously in Divorcing Jack (1995) while enjoying a much-needed second honeymoon with his estranged wife Patricia. But Patricia, pregnant by her married lover, isn't about to book passage for the New World, so Starkey packs a few clean shirts and takes off with Bobby's entourage for the Big Apple, where Bobby will run rings around Tyson in a joint press conference and immediately incur the wrath of the Sons of Muhammed, a splinter group as violent as the Provos but a lot more inept. Then Bobby's wife Mary is kidnapped, presumably by the Sons of Muhammed, and Starkey is dragged into the fray by two heavyweight ex-NYPD detectives who dwarf even the Fat Boy. But how can Starkey really be sure that it's the Sons who are behind the snatch, when Bobby, training in Provincetown, has also managed to antagonize the gay community, the IRA, and the ferocious sparring partner who keeps threatening to end his career before he even makes it into the ring with Tyson? More relaxed and less wildly funny than Divorcing Jack or Cycle of Violence (1996)—but then that's what you'd expect when the brutality is only a game.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55970-376-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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