. . . suck brains with a genius who really is a genius: that is, when you Read This Book.
Sheer charm most of the way in debut fiction by acclaimed book-cover artist Kidd, associate director of jackets at Knopf.
So, what are cheese monkeys? Back in 1957, Nameless the Narrator has little idea what college means and so chooses an art major as the path of least hardship. When State U beds him down three-to-a-room, he takes up sleeping on a mattress in the art room, where plump Dottie Spang teaches Introduction to Drawing. He soon falls for talented, outspoken, Salingeresque cutie-pie Himillsy H. Dodd, a whisky drinker who drops him with such exotica as “McGreet” and the “loove” and tells him Dottie Spang “couldn’t teach a piece of shit how to stink.” The Venus de Milo? “She’s a woman as men want her: a nice set of knockers and no fists or fingernails to defend them. You’re all pigs.” What does she think of the Dixie chick Maybelle Lee in their art class? “She’s a birthday cake with legs.” This trio’s intellectual explosion comes with Introduction to Commercial Art, which their teacher, Winter Sorbeck, instantly tells them is a misnomer: the class is Introduction to Graphic Design. “Commercial Art tries to make you buy things. Graphic Design gives you ideas.” Sorbeck blazes with staggeringly intense ideas—GOOD IS DEAD—that joyously burn up the page. He is worth any reader’s time, his sadism too wonderful to mangle here. How best can you thumb a ride with only a sheet of paper and a marker? Try: I AM NOT ARMED. That’s an idea Himmilsy comes up with when Sorbeck takes the whole class out and makes them put ideas into action on a stingingly cold winter day, the students one by one stopping cars with a graphic design held aloft. Some later scenes remain problematic. But, winterized, the students soon see everything everywhere in Graphic Design, as will you when you . . . .
. . . suck brains with a genius who really is a genius: that is, when you Read This Book.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1492-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
