A fresh, if sometimes-sentimental, recounting of the first Christmas.
A children’s story of Jesus’ birth, told simply, reverently, and often entertainingly by an owl in the Bethlehem stable.
In Brizendine’s (Grandma Thoughts, 2013) creative Nativity story, the titular bird starts off confused as Joseph and Mary unexpectedly intrude into his home, but he’s soon touched by their loving relationship and becomes excited at the prospect of witnessing the birth of their child. After the baby comes, the wise owl keeps tabs on the family, surprised at the arrival of worshiping shepherds and the gifts of the wise men. The last time the owl sees the family is when they’re on their way to Egypt, but later he hears miraculous things about the baby: specifically, how he’s actually both man and God and born to a virgin mother. The owl’s final words seem as if they come straight from Brizendine herself: “I continue to tell my story because I have seen God!” They’re followed by a few related New Testament excerpts and an invitation to readers to come to know Jesus personally in their hearts. One of the strengths of this presentation of the Christmas story is its comprehensiveness, as it covers all major events from the stable to the story of Herod’s infamous slaughter of male infants—a heavy topic for a children’s book but true to the tale. Like many Nativity stories, however, the text adds romanticized details, such as a glowing, smiling baby Jesus, and not all readers may be fond of this fact. The owl’s commentary also seems awkward at times, but overall, its unique perspective and juvenile tone is spot-on for this book’s target audience of Christian kids. The medium and mood of the illustrations constantly changes; after some owl photographs at the beginning, remaining illustrations seems to alternate between sedate and cartoonish, with colored-pencil drawings and what seems like clip art. Each of the images is appealing and relevant to the storyline, but the book would have benefited from greater illustrative predictability.
A fresh, if sometimes-sentimental, recounting of the first Christmas.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4908-9175-0
Page Count: 30
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.
The renowned writer offers advice on information-gathering and nonfiction composition.
The book consists of eight instructive and charming essays about creating narratives, all of them originally composed for the New Yorker, where McPhee (Silk Parachute, 2010, etc.) has been a contributor since the mid-1960s. Reading them consecutively in one volume constitutes a master class in writing, as the author clearly demonstrates why he has taught so successfully part-time for decades at Princeton University. In one of the essays, McPhee focuses on the personalities and skills of editors and publishers for whom he has worked, and his descriptions of those men and women are insightful and delightful. The main personality throughout the collection, though, is McPhee himself. He is frequently self-deprecating, occasionally openly proud of his accomplishments, and never boring. In his magazine articles and the books resulting from them, McPhee rarely injects himself except superficially. Within these essays, he offers a departure by revealing quite a bit about his journalism, his teaching life, and daughters, two of whom write professionally. Throughout the collection, there emerge passages of sly, subtle humor, a quality often absent in McPhee’s lengthy magazine pieces. Since some subjects are so weighty—especially those dealing with geology—the writing can seem dry. There is no dry prose here, however. Almost every sentence sparkles, with wordplay evident throughout. Another bonus is the detailed explanation of how McPhee decided to tackle certain topics and then how he chose to structure the resulting pieces. Readers already familiar with the author’s masterpieces—e.g., Levels of the Game, Encounters with the Archdruid, Looking for a Ship, Uncommon Carriers, Oranges, and Coming into the Country—will feel especially fulfilled by McPhee’s discussions of the specifics from his many books.
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14274-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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