Short on subtlety and insider dish, this political page-turner will nevertheless rally the blue and annoy the red.
California Senator Boxer’s first novel follows the fortunes of a young children’s advocate and her politically polarized swains.
Another dogwood-redolent D.C. spring, 2001. Frosh Senator Ellen Fischer (D-Calif.) is considering how best to block the appointment of conservative Frida Hernandez to the Supreme Court. Greg, a journalist co-opted by the right, offers her the dirt she needs: hospital records suggesting Hernandez abused her child. Pillow talk between Greg and former researcher Micaela reveals that the tell-tale documents are fakes. Flashback to 1974, Berkeley. Ellen is canvassing signatures for the Children’s Alliance when she encounters two fellow UC seniors, pony-tailed radical Josh Fischer and studly Greg Hunter, the rejected son of an ex-Marine. Josh and Ellen are drawn to each other ideologically, but on the night of Nixon’s resignation, she and Greg share a post-celebratory one-night stand. Cut to 1982. Ellen and Josh are married. He’s a beleaguered public defender while Ellen continues her work rescuing disadvantaged children for the Alliance. Greg, cub reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, reconnects with gal-pal socialite Jane Hecht, ingratiating himself with her father, Gunther, a Reagan-backer. Josh falls hard for Bianca, a murder defendant’s wife, but she disappears after her husband’s acquittal. In 1989, Josh heroically interrupts a high-school shooting. His political career accelerates as he cleans up a polluted neighborhood. Greg succumbs to the blandishments of Senator Carl Satcher, Republican powerhouse. Soon Greg has morphed into Satcher’s media lapdog, his investigative skills harnessed for dirt-digging on Democrats. Josh challenges Satcher for his Senate seat in 1998, and Greg and Micaela find Bianca. Josh is most daunted by the insinuation that he fathered Bianca’s daughter, since Ellen’s longing for a child was thwarted by infertility. Driving recklessly home to confess, Josh rear-ends a truck and—why ruin the suspense?
Short on subtlety and insider dish, this political page-turner will nevertheless rally the blue and annoy the red.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8118-5043-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
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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