Most dog-lovers (and many others) will be moved by Angus’s stories and adore being drowned in his sensibilities, which...
A memoir told telepathically by a dying Jack Russell terrier named Angus who’s owned by author Siebert (Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral, 1997) and his wife Bex, known herein as Huge-Head and Sweet-Voice, a questionable device when Angus the terrier knows many place names as well as the names of people he’s never met.
But one willingly suspends disbelief and allows Siebert all the latitude he needs to get his story underway. This tale, however, lies in the consciousness of an 11-month-old dog, making less for a great plot than for a series of episodes whose interest resides not in the action but rather in Siebert’s powers of recording Angus’s synesthetic sensation-thought-feelings. And the devilishly stubborn and willful Angus is a fabulously gifted telepathist who, with Siebert’s help, writes better than most of his listener-readers. The power of scent in a terrier has seldom been as strongly captured, though Siebert’s skill at this falls slightly short of Tolstoy’s affective power to enter animals’ minds (see “Strider: The Story of a Horse”), a comparison Siebert probably can live with. In England, Angus was taken from his mother at ten weeks by Huge-Head and Sweet-Voice, whose dog Lucy was deep into her last days. Quite amusing is Angus’s trip to Canada by a plane also carrying a rhino, horses, two emus, and a parrot. Unfortunately, his reckless character has him rushing out into the woods each evening, following scents, and when at times he doesn’t return, being sought by his owners. One night in the woods he’s attacked by a mysterious animal (a mother coyote protecting her pups). He tells us his adventures during his months in Canada while trying to drag himself back home, unable to answer the voices calling for him.
Most dog-lovers (and many others) will be moved by Angus’s stories and adore being drowned in his sensibilities, which Siebert invests with many powerful lyric moments indeed.Pub Date: May 2, 2000
ISBN: 0-609-60494-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
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
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
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