by Bruce Murkoff ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 2004
Ambitious and ultimately successful. Like the big dam.
Construction of the Hoover Dam attracts a fine cast of characters in a solid debut.
The lives of three heartbroken people—an engineer, a young divorcée, and a furious young fighter—converge in southern Nevada, the only healthy spot in an equally heartbroken and battered country in the last days of the Hoover administration. Young engineer Filius Poe brings a stellar resume from his Wisconsin home after years of increasingly responsible positions building minor dams. Emotionally numb following the sailing death of his nine-year-old son and the sympathetic death of his wife, burdens for which he blames himself, Poe is living only to work, smoke, and drink. Lena McCardell has fled her lifetime home in Oklahoma with her young son Burr after the discovery of her salesman husband’s bigamy. Pint-sized professional ruffian Lew Beck has scuttled in from Los Angeles, leaving behind his clueless immigrant parents, a trail of barely breathing bodies, and the humanity he lost in childhood. These three, and a dozen or so carefully sketched supporting characters, join the thousands of workers, some professional but most barely skilled, using brute force and brilliant engineering to wrench the Colorado River from its course in order to build the biggest dam in the world, a marvel that will plug in the desert and make today’s Las Vegas possible. The sweet, careful, mutual attractions of Lena and Filius and of the engineer for the boy are handled skillfully, as is the terrifying malevolence of the increasingly murderous Beck, who haunts the story as powerfully as Iago. The construction scenes are as clear and compelling as the newsreels and documentary films in which writer Murkoff must have steeped himself. Detracting only slightly is the tendency of characters to speak either in expository prose or ’30s movie dialogue, the dark side of watching too many newsreels.
Ambitious and ultimately successful. Like the big dam.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4038-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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