A scattershot and thematically confusing collection.
Six Arizona-based authors present an anthology of poetry, essays and short fiction from their collective works.
Covering topics as diverse as the craft of writing, relationships, aging and even “Business, Culture and Society,” this compendium showcases the work of six writers hailing from Tucson, Ariz. Divided into 11 sections, their material is indexed as “General Essays,” “Historical Essays,” “Reflective Essays,” “Poetry” and “Short Stories.” But these varied forms and voices don’t always blend into a unified whole. Noble’s reflective essays, in particular, seem out of place; with titles like “Clearing the Deck for Success,” “How to Be a Millionaire” and “How to Be Really, Truly Well,” each essay reads like a chapter lifted from a self-help manual encouraging readers to “Say YES to Life” and “Say YES to Creativity.” Burrows-Johnson’s historical essays are interesting, if not thorough; her “Early History of Tucson and Her Cemeteries” never mentions the beautiful Binghampton Cemetery, established in 1899 in the Catalina Foothills and named Tucson’s best cemetery in 2007 by Tucson Weekly. General essays cover everything from bringing home a new cat (“Joshua Finds a Home,” Cosby-Patton) to putting up with a retired husband (“Retirement,” Lesh). Even the politcal makes an appearance in Sakin’s “A Declaration of Complete Independence.” Sakin also offers up a polemic blaming most societal ills on Starbucks in “Addled.” The pieces are generally quite brief, somewhat humorous and fairly casual. They often read more like blog entries than the sort of well-developed essays fans of the form expect to find in places like Best American Essays. The strongest section in the collection is the poetry, especially that of Cosby-Patton and her “Homage to My Thighs,” which pays homage to Clifton’s “Homage to My Hips,” and “As a Jewel in the Crown,” which asks for “a tried angel / an angel whose silver-stranded / tangled hair / slips beneath a tarnished halo.” Ultimately, this collection would have been more cohesive and successful if the authors had chosen to focus on a particular theme or genre.
A scattershot and thematically confusing collection.Pub Date: July 20, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Imaginings Press
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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