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CALLED OUT

Name: CALLED OUT
Author: A.G. Mojtabai
ISBN: 0-385-47430-X

by A.G. Mojtabai ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1994

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When a passenger jet crashes near the desolate Texas town of Bounds, tragedy links the lives of victims and townspeople, forcing the citizens of an insular community to confront a world on which most turned their backs long ago. An unnamed, out-of-town newspaper reporter pinpoints the novel's narrative technique while musing on the unreliability of conflicting eyewitness accounts of the crash: ``That's how it always is with one event seen through different windows.'' The windows Mojtabai (Ordinary Time, 1989, etc.) constructs are monologues through which three main witnesses tell their stories in alternating chapters, interrupted occasionally by minor characters. After the reporter, the two other main witnesses are Father Mark, the town's Catholic priest, and Glenna Wooten, the town's postmaster. Their folksy, colloquial speech, meant to be both poetic and sensible, is what we expect from these familiar salt-of-the-earth types (hardy, defiant, proud of their simplicity and bedrock values), and it contributes greatly to the novel's tensionless, conversational feel and to the blurry uniformity of the characters. From the moment the plane crashes, the focus is on the townspeople; the victims—initially, gory corpses and the ghostly walking wounded; later, the survivors and relatives of those who died—seem curiously incidental. The plot's only conflict develops late: To accommodate the flood of survivors and relatives drawn to the crash site, Father Mark keeps the church open night and day. Members of the parish council, upset by the increased cost of utilities, challenge the priest by asking, ``Whose church is this, anyway?'' The question we are meant to ponder is whether a brotherhood of man unites us, whether some larger human connection makes these outsiders neighbors rather than strangers. Mojtabai's fragmented narrative offers no definitive answers, but her writing is occasionally powerful in the dead-on rightness of isolated images and in its evocation of the fascination catastrophe holds. (Author tour)

Pub Date: June 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-385-47430-X

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.