Greeley, timeless as Rome, springs eternal.
Greeley returns with The Sixth Chronicle of the O’Malley Family in the Twentieth Century, the first having been 1998’s A Midwinter’s Tale.
In volume four, the Catholic O’Malleys of Chicago, Chucky and sexpot Rosemarie, began singing “September Song” in their early and middle 40s, though that late leaf-fall usually strikes in one’s 50s or 60s. Or was it just blues for the Jack and Bobby Kennedy deaths? Now in their late 40s, the O’Malleys face Chucky’s midlife identity crisis, volume five never having appeared at Kirkus. In any event, the plot appears to pick up where September Song (2001) left off—or else volume five made little difference. Now we find the O’Malleys in Rome, in 1978, and a new Pope being chosen (who will soon die and himself be replaced). First, there’s Chucky describing for us his wife’s postcoital body, which, for a fastidious man whom Jack Kennedy sent as our ambassador to Germany, seems boorish until Rosemarie, who takes up alternate chapters for the Crazy O’Malleys, reveals that “Our sex life wasn’t always great, no one’s is. But it was mostly good and often great, sometimes almost transcendent.” Now Chucky’s moping, sapped and disillusioned, a sad sack who’s lost his rambunctiousness despite a once-great career as a decorated Korean vet, his spunk as a photographer of America’s racial crisis in Little Rock, his ambassadorship, and later tiffs with LBJ about Vietnam. Though the O’Malleys were appointed by Paul VI to help revise birth-control teaching, their suggestions were ignored. They now fight a well-protected pedophile priest, then go up against Chicago’s lying, corrupt, paranoid, fat, ugly, psychopathic Cardinal Archbishop Thomas John O’Neill, one of Greeley’s grungiest creations, whose portrait Chucky shoots. Chucky collects a dossier on O’Neill to get Rome to dismiss him. The Pope sighs no. Now O’Neill shores up more power while Chucky’s health wavers and evergreen family problems prick and writhe.
Greeley, timeless as Rome, springs eternal.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30236-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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