A swing and a miss.
An aging baseball player struggles with life off the field.
When he met young reporter Fannie, Sol Bable was a hopeful young catcher at a major-league tryout camp in Florida. Though Sol fails to understand Fannie’s reasons, she fixes her attention on him, among all of the other rookies, and not just in search of a story. When Sol is sent to Jamaica to play in a winter exhibition league, she loyally awaits his return. With his future on the line, Sol tries to remain focused on his job, but is overwhelmingly curious about the colorful landscape and native culture. He follows the hotel bellhop to a Mas Afrikani ceremony, where he finds a frenzied gathering of dancers. He is taken with the beautiful Celeste, the daughter of the preacher Pop Wise. She refuses Sol’s advances, though, and will be swayed only if he is willing to undertake a dangerous journey into the hills to seek out the mystical Mas. Hopelessly infatuated, Sol sets off, but finds nothing. Fairly chagrined, he descends from the mountain, finishes the baseball season and returns to America. Twenty years later, after a highly successful career as the starting catcher for the New York Heroes, Sol is facing retirement and an uncertain future. As a baseball strike begins, the team owners ask him to try to win over the players to end the impasse. He seems to enjoy his role in the spotlight as ambassador, but Fannie fears for him and resents his erratic presence at home. This story of a man who fails to find meaning and direction in his life, despite his outward success, has real pathos. Unfortunately, it’s hopelessly buried under gruff, overwrought prose so stuffed with tortured metaphors, frequently related to baseball, as to be often nearly incoherent: “If Woolly’s hands could hang from a wet mop like a flag from its staff, it was due to his total disregard for physical labor. He could always post-up and do nothing as stiffly as a mannequin before the hotel’s lobby doors. The big man put both of his hands in motion, as they fairly danced about his head now like elves circling a bear in a fairy tale.”
A swing and a miss.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-9785814-0-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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