THE BELLWETHER REVIVALS

Name: THE BELLWETHER REVIVALS
Author: Benjamin Wood
ISBN: 978-0-670-02359-2

by Benjamin Wood ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2012

Wood moves the reader deftly through pastoral Cambridge, into the British upper crust, and ultimately into the mad mind of...

bookshelf

Eden Bellwether, an organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, has the idea he can heal through the power of music, but Wood raises the possibility that Eden has a Narcissistic Personality Disorder and is thus suffering from delusions about his powers.

The Bellwether family is characterized by both brilliance and eccentricity—and perhaps the two inevitably go together. Eden’s sister Iris is a medical student at Cambridge and a fine musician in her own right, a cellist rather than an organist, and she bounces between unflappable adoration of her brother and suspicion that he might be a pathological case study. One autumn evening, Oscar Lowe, a nurse’s assistant at a local nursing home, cuts across the King’s College grounds and is attracted by the sonorous sound of an organ. On this fateful evening he meets Eden and Iris. Despite their differences Oscar and Iris feel an immediate, quirky attraction for one another, and they quickly become lovers. Oscar, though highly intelligent and well read, has found for himself a path other than academia, but he feels himself drawn in by the undeniable charisma of the Bellwethers. His favorite patient at the nursing home is Abraham “Bram” Paulsen, a former distinguished professor of English, whose friendship with Herbert Crest, a brilliant psychologist, leads to a complicated and volatile mixture of personalities and motives. When Iris breaks her leg, Eden seems to heal her through a bizarre regimen of physical and musical therapy. Crest becomes intrigued with Eden’s putative powers, at least in part because the psychologist is dying of a malignant brain tumor, so his professional—and skeptical—motives become entangled with his personal ones, the latter characterized by Delusions of Hope, the book he’s desperately trying to finish writing before his death.

Wood moves the reader deftly through pastoral Cambridge, into the British upper crust, and ultimately into the mad mind of Eden himself.

Pub Date: July 2, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-670-02359-2

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SEASCRAPER
by Benjamin Wood

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ECLIPTIC
by Benjamin Wood

bookshelf

LONESOME DOVE

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

bookshelf

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

bookshelf

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.