The ongoing feuds here often seem like overwrought plot contrivances, a problem aggravated by this newcomer’s fossilizing...
Ambitious historical novel of New York City’s medical practices from the 1630s to the 1780s, a first novel freighted with so much fact and family melodrama it almost sinks under its own weight.
Swerling’s narrative tracks two families, the Turners and the Devreys, through six generations of medical practice, economic success and failure, and bitter internecine feuds, treacheries, and reconciliations. This 150-year scope creates complexities that can be followed only by using a family tree, and luckily Swerling provides one. Still, there are so many characters that none gets developed fully, making it easy for the reader to lose track. The Turners are (mostly) surgeons and the Devreys are (mostly) physicians, though several women in both families are apothecaries. At the time, these were competing rather than complementary medical disciplines. The surgeons and apothecaries are clearly favored as Swerling takes us on a fascinating journey through the bold early conflicts between herbal healing and surgery and the mainstream practices taught in the medical schools of the day. The physicians, though more prestigious and “educated,” offer their patients little beyond bleeding and purging, while the surgeons provide dramatic scenes of early operations for breast cancer and bladder stones, along with tracheotomies and limb removals. Unlike the physicians, the surgeons experiment with blood transfusions, use laudanum to dull pain, and favor inoculations. Indian attacks, slave revolts, wars, plagues of smallpox and yellow fever, and the brutal everyday life of the city itself—rapes, castrations, venereal diseases, public whippings and burnings—supply carnage aplenty for members of each generation to practice their skills on and argue about.
The ongoing feuds here often seem like overwrought plot contrivances, a problem aggravated by this newcomer’s fossilizing tendency to pack her dialogue with exposition. But early medicine and city history undeniably make for an interesting read.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87172-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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