BOMBINGHAM

Name: BOMBINGHAM
Author: Anthony Grooms
ISBN: 0-7432-0558-8

by Anthony Grooms ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2001

Powerfully crafted individual moments and honestly drawn emotions, but first-timer Grooms can’t quite synthesize them into a...

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An engaging though loosely woven debut about an African-American boy who experiences the death of his mother—and the words of Martin Luther King—in the same year.

Walter Burke trudges toward a village in Vietnam and watches a pair of friends die in a firefight. Composing a letter to their families turns his thoughts to his turbulent youth in Birmingham, Alabama. Flashing back, Grooms, an award-winning short-story writer, poet, and essayist, does a lovely job of sketching such timeless aspects of Walter’s and his friend Lamar’s boyhood as their search for specimens to examine under Lamar’s microscope, even as he nails the details of institutionalized racism in the 1960s. As children, Walter and his sister Josie share as their most pressing concern the declining health of their mother Clara, who refuses to seek medical assistance. It seems Clara has adopted a fatalist’s stance toward her cancer—driven, Walter suspects, by her memory of her own father’s senseless death years ago on trumped-up charges of raping a white woman. Her frustrated husband Carl finds solace in area bars. Meanwhile, civil rights marches, boycotts, and protests gather force. Grooms vividly evokes these stirring events, as well as Walter’s cruel experiences at the receiving end of police brutality; the boy’s cathartic transformation during a particularly brutal assault is especially persuasive. Then Aunt Bennie comes from Philadelphia to help her sister Clara, Josie is dragged into jail after her dog is viciously killed by a police canine, Clara dies, Carl is never reconciled to her death, and Walter ships out for Vietnam—which returns us to Bombingham’s opening scene.

Powerfully crafted individual moments and honestly drawn emotions, but first-timer Grooms can’t quite synthesize them into a unified whole.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-7432-0558-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Free Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

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When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.