FOREIGNERS

Name: FOREIGNERS
Author: Caryl Phillips
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4397-2

by Caryl Phillips ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 26, 2007

On balance, Phillips’s fictional touches do not help illuminate the issues of race and identity, which he has dealt with...

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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

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

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Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).

All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."

Pub Date: April 8, 1974

ISBN: 0385086954

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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OTHER WORLDS THAN THESE
by Stephen King & Peter Straub

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NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

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YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

- SEEN & HEARD
Stephen King Used ‘Carrie’ Advance To Support Mom

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New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.