Delman's second foray into the mid-19th century (Ain't Goin' to Glory, 1991) is a period/courtroom hybrid—an Age of Presumed Innocence based on the scandalous 1851 case in which America's foremost tragedian and his wife launched countersuits for divorce, each accusing the other of adultery. The principals in the case would have gladdened the hearts of the tabloids. Edwin Forrest, already famous for his magnetic performances and his thespian high-handedness, had recently achieved notoriety of a different kind when a demonstration against Forrest's British rival William Macready staged by the Friends of Forrest, a group of supporters headed by the legendary publicist Ned Buntline, left 22 dead outside the Astor Theater. Catherine Sinclair Forrest, his British wife, was almost equally notorious in more select circles for her advanced views, which saw marriage as economic enslavement and monogamy as unnatural. The two opposing attorneys were Charles O'Conor, who would go on to defend Jefferson Davis and prosecute Boss Tweed, and John Van Buren, son of the former President. And the haplessly stiff-necked crowd of luminaries caught in the crossfire ran the gamut from the late actress Josephine Clifton (who may have enjoyed a liaison with Forrest eight years ago) to Nathaniel Parker Willis, New York's leading magazine editor (publicly accused by the outraged husband as ``the seducer of Catherine Forrest''). In order to reach a verdict, the jury was asked to consider whether Forrest's repeated visits to a house of ill-repute, or his wife's receiving a letter identifying her with the indomitably chaste heroine of a George Sand novel (gasp!), constituted more incriminating behavior. The high-profile players, and the determination of the court to maintain decorum while recording scabrous accusations, make the court proceedings as fascinating as most fictional murder trials. Only in the conventional offstage flourishes—pages from Catherine's diary, the romance of a journalist with one of Catherine's supporters—does Delman disappoint.
Pub Date: Feb. 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10432-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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