A gripping and remarkably fine first collection of 11 stories, mapping the changing moral byways of a dying New England mill-town and angling inside the lives of the town's often warring Irish, Italian, Wasp, and newer Puerto Rican inhabitants. In ``The First Snow,'' a contemporary 17-year-old son sticks by his father—a weak, overweight, Waspy Lawton Falls junior-high teacher who has just been arrested for homosexual conduct at a highway rest-stop—even though his mother and brother have fled in horror and he is repelled, too. In ``The Miracle,'' a devoted priest called Father D'Agostino, whose parish is the poorest in Lawton Falls in the 1960's, hesitantly asks a local gangster named Davio Giaccalone for help in saving the church from demolition; a fire is set elsewhere, the church is preserved, but a homeless man dies, and D'Agostino is undone by moral pain. In ``Violet'' and ``All Best Wishes,'' contemporary town yuppies face revealing romantic crises; and in ``The Greyhounds,'' two insouciant young computer programmers from out of town steal an aging Davio Giaccalone's beloved greyhound dog—a mistake, as it turns out, since Giaccalone is still dangerous. The violence turns explicit in the ``Brothers,'' about the gang rape of a Puerto Rican girl by three Irish and Italian garage mechanics in the 1970's. The girl, Maria Mendez, is seen again in ``The Birthday Cake,'' in which an old Italian woman refuses to give up the last cake in a neighborhood bakery for Maria's daughter's birthday party. Davio Giaccalone is definitively betrayed in the elegant, almost classic ``The Last Good Man'': while maneuvering to keep the town's last mill from being closed by the Japanese, he entrusts crucial information to a newspaper reporter who, however, has resolved to learn to look out for himself. There's more—all of it rich in detail and theme.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-87023-865-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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