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BIOGRAPHY

Name: BIOGRAPHY
Author: Celia Gittelson
ISBN: 0-394-58712-X

by Celia Gittelson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1991

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``There's a kind of peace when dealing with the dead. What's done has been done.'' During the course of this radiant, funny, and shrewd novel by the author of Saving Grace (1981), the peaceful, quasi-hermit Raphael Alter—landlord of an ancient, moldy, forlorn tenement (with tenants to match), and biographer of a dead poet- -learns that ``peace,'' of an isolate sort, can be smacked broadside by the living and wrecked by a deed of the dead. Around the hermitage apartment of Raphael, the biographer of American poet Maxwell Leibert, dead 15 years, the needs of his poverty-line, ailing tenants—ill, dying, deserted, dead-ended- -relentlessly lap. Strapped for money himself, Raphael can offer only promises, surface patch-ups—no major building (or life) overhaul. At the same time, there's the absorbing search for the essential Max Leibert—twice married, an uncomfortable father, later a drunk tending toward violence. (Included are samples of Max's strong, growling journal prose.) Raphael continues to trawl for more Max material from those-who-knew-him, but, meanwhile, there's the woman Chloe—touching, enigmatic—withholding a secret just beyond Raphael's fingertips. With the stirrings of love like a subterranean tremor—amplified by the tenement's ``hellish crazy circle of humanity,'' and suddenly shot through with the horror of Chloe's terrible secret—there will come a mammoth, shattering apotheosis—literally, a blast—ending Raphael's ``life's plan'' but also beginning a life. A canny blend of summer yea-saying sentiment and a wintry recognition of the aching sadness of little lives, embellished with wicked satiric gibes at academics and their publishers, and lively with endemic dictions—from the stagy drawl of lit'ry types to the various bleats from the lower depths. Rich and warming and a joy.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991

ISBN: 0-394-58712-X

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.