An overlong and uninteresting first-person novel, bearing all the signs of a roman Ö clef, about the New York Orthodox Jewish community. Yakov Eisen, son of a well-known ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Borough Park, Brooklyn, is having a crisis of faith. Although raised to follow in his father's and grandfather's footsteps to study for ordination at the Mir Yeshiva and become a rabbi and scholar, Yakov wants to attend the less Orthodox Yeshiva University and learn secular philosophy as well as religious subjects. And as if this weren't enough to break his rigidly observant father's already weak heart, Yakov also falls in love with an amazingly unsuitable woman: Rebecca, whom Yakov meets as a teenager in an Orthodox resort—Dirty Dancing meets A Stranger Among Us—is not only the daughter of Rabbi Eisen's former best friend and his ex- fiancÇe. Worse, she's also studying to become a rabbi, an occupation forbidden to Orthodox Jewish women. But Yakov never gets to confront his father with Rebecca: Just as he is agonizing over whether or not to commit to her, and therefore to her religious choices, his father dies suddenly of a heart attack. Although unable to resolve his conflicts with his father personally, Rabbi Eisen's death is a turning point for Yakov: He finally realizes that Orthodoxy is important to him but that he can't practice it the way he would like in America. Only in Israel can Yakov find peace, happiness, and a new beginning. By the close, Yakov is a loving husband and father, an eminent scholar in the field of medical ethics, and unbearably smug. In fact, throughout his story, Yakov is self-righteous—even during those times he claims to be filled with doubts and misgivings. Readers in the know may want to look at Kane's detailed portraits of Jewish leaders in New York; otherwise, there is little to recommend in this puerile debut.
Pub Date: April 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11879-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
