Some nice shades of green but not much of a palette: Celtophiles will find plenty of sustenance here, but for most others it...
Eleven stories by different authors, all set in a modern Ireland poised uncomfortably between traditional certainties and contemporary hopes.
Although the “Celtic Tiger” seems to have lost its fangs in the past few years, Ireland’s astonishing economic growth of the last decade has transformed the country for keeps—and not all are happy with the changes. Walsh has brought together young (or youngish) voices here to illustrate the distance traveled from the old sod to the new. Some are frankly nostalgic: Claire Keegan’s “Night of the Quicken Trees” describes the touching courtship of a classic Irish bachelor farmer (he lets his goat sleep on his bed) and a wild, haunted woman who is a skilled healer (toads figure prominently in many of her remedies). Other pieces are more wistful: Tom Humphries’ “Australia Day” watches, through the eyes of an alienated pub owner, the gradual transformation of a ramshackle country village into a glitzy tourist trap (“I couldn’t draw you a map of where is where anymore”), while Aidan Matthews’s “Barber-Surgeons” follows the transformations of the 1960s from the perspective of a lonely small-town barber whose experience of the larger world is limited to his conversations with his customers. Some of the portrayals are downright hostile: The bohemian Dublin yobs of Sean O’Reilly’s “Playboy” are nihilistic thugs of the Graham Swift/James Kellman stripe, while the hotshot businessman of Keith Ridgeway’s “Grid Work” is little more than a well-paid zombie. The best piece is “It’s a Miracle,” by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne: Quietly powerful (somewhat in the style of William Trevor), it concerns the shadowy, emotionally isolated life of a divorced librarian whose life is almost changed by a chance meeting with an unhappy Italian in a Vienna restaurant.
Some nice shades of green but not much of a palette: Celtophiles will find plenty of sustenance here, but for most others it will be about as tasty as a plate of boiled potatoes and cabbage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1206-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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