An excellent attempt to portray criminality with the kind of sympathy and understanding that Steinbeck brought to indigence.
In this insightful, troubling debut, a convict struggles to stay alive in prison, to avoid going back after he gets out, and to rise above the label society has stamped on him.
Doc Kane is 16 years into a 20-year sentence for killing his abusive son-in-law with a shotgun. In scorpion-infested Tyburn prison, a place seemingly designed to bake its inmates in the Nevada desert sun, Doc has done what was necessary to survive, including dealing drugs and collecting debts for the D.C. Blacks, a gang he joined inside for protection. But now that his parole hearing is coming up, not keeping his nose clean means much worse than the customary time in the “hole”: he’d have to serve out his next four years. So Doc is trying to walk the straight and narrow. But he’s vulnerable to accusation when his gang brothers want to stage a revenge killing of another inmate, and it doesn’t help that one hostile prison guard is eager to nail Doc for any violation he can. Nor is the struggle finished when Doc gets released: everything about his old life tugs at him to break parole and return to drug-dealing and robbery. First-novelist Parsons leavens the grim story with jailbird humor, and he makes it easy to sympathize with Doc’s dilemma. He portrays his hero as a paradox: a sometimes vicious, sometimes compassionate man whose actions are governed by fealty to the street code, a set of rules that, though violent, are at the same time logical and fair. Doc’s adherence to the code even while those around him break it makes him a man of honor, but living by its often illegal dictates means he’s constantly in danger of going back to the slammer.
An excellent attempt to portray criminality with the kind of sympathy and understanding that Steinbeck brought to indigence.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27855-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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