HOW I BECAME A FISHERMAN NAMED PETE

Name: HOW I BECAME A FISHERMAN NAMED PETE
Author: David Spencer
ISBN: 1-880909-65-0

by David Spencer ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2003

Disarmingly simple, despite its hairpin twists and buried secrets: Spencer manages to convey the real wonder of discovering...

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A meticulously crafted coming-of-age tale by recent college graduate Spencer.

Tom Banner, at twentysomething, is so innocent that he almost begs to be taken advantage of. A dock manager at a Baltimore shipping firm, he dutifully swallows any indignity that his cretinous boss Steve sends his way, whether it’s sitting through the same corporate orientation film with each new batch of employees or scouring out the staff kitchen to save the cost of cleaners. How is he rewarded? With dismissal, once Steve discovers that Tom never repaid the $80 he never even knew had accidentally been added to his paycheck. Steve even threatens to charge Tom with theft, and the innocent lad panics and skips town. He hides out in Ocean City, Maryland, with Leah Greene, the niece of a Baltimore friend, and waits for his friend and co-worker Conrad Begg to call when the coast is clear at home. Leah works in a bar and is obviously unhappy and lonely. She seems attracted to Tom, but there’s something so odd and distant about her that Tom tries to discourage her—and her uncle Fritz, who is determined to set the pair up for some reason neither Tom nor Leah can understand. Tom takes odd jobs, then finds something more permanent when Fritz’s friend Joe mistakes Tom for someone named Pete and hires him to work on his fishing boat. Tom isn’t a natural-born fisherman, but he hits it off with Joe, who offers him a salary and place to live if he stays on. Tom’s tempted but wants to get back to his old life in Baltimore. Or does he? By now he and Leah have fallen in love—but Tom still has to learn what Dark Secret she’s keeping from him.

Disarmingly simple, despite its hairpin twists and buried secrets: Spencer manages to convey the real wonder of discovering life for the first time.

Pub Date: March 1, 2003

ISBN: 1-880909-65-0

Page Count: 320

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.