On balance, Phillips’s fictional touches do not help illuminate the issues of race and identity, which he has dealt with...
Phillips (Dancing in the Dark, 2005, etc.) mixes fact and fiction to examine the sad fates of three very different men of color in England.
Francis Barber, more son than servant to Dr. Samuel Johnson, was one of the best-known black men in London in the 18th century. In Phillips’s first piece (“Dr. Johnson’s Watch”), the unnamed narrator rides in the same coach as Barber, the Doctor’s principal legatee, to the great man’s funeral. Sixteen years later, the narrator, by now a retired financier, travels to Lichfield, Johnson’s hometown, to find Barber’s white wife living in poverty and Barber on his deathbed in a grim infirmary; communication is minimal. Barber’s squandering of his legacy has been well-documented, and Phillips adds no new insights. The second, much longer piece, “Made in Wales,” is a workmanlike third-person account of the life of Randolph Turpin, the mixed-race British boxer whose career highlight was his 1951 defeat of Sugar Ray Robinson to become world middleweight champion. Turpin held the title for 64 days before Robinson reclaimed it at their New York rematch. From there it was mostly downhill for Turpin: woman troubles, money troubles, bankruptcy and suicide at 38. The last piece, “Northern Lights,” is the harrowing story of David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who wound up in Leeds in Yorkshire in 1949. (Phillips’s family emigrated from the Caribbean to Leeds, where the author was raised.) Phillips uses some seven different and presumably invented narrators for his portrait of Oluwale; they track his deterioration, but the man remains an enigma, and the summaries of the city’s history are obtrusive. The Nigerian was a gentle loner whose homelessness made him the target of two rogue cops, who caused his death by drowning and were convicted on assault charges. In death Oluwale’s name became a rallying cry for activists.
On balance, Phillips’s fictional touches do not help illuminate the issues of race and identity, which he has dealt with better elsewhere.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4397-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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