Excellent amusement—Georgette Heyer for the gents.
A bothersome death sentence interrupts the adventures of dashing Georgian naval hero Alan Lewrie, but not for long. Action resumes in the Bay of Biscay.
Now a post-captain with a lovely new ship, Savage, freshly snatched from the French and newly rigged for action, Lewrie, in his 14th adventure (A King’s Trade, 2006, etc.), is itching to put to sea. What’s stopping him is a spot of legal trouble. Big trouble, actually. The Jamaican plantation owner whose slaves Lewrie liberated when he was last in the Caribbean has ramrodded a trial through the island courts and obtained a death sentence for Alan in absentia. Ludicrous as the charge may be (the slaves were unsurprisingly eager to liberate themselves) and rotten as the Jamaican court proceedings may have been, the islanders have legal rights in the British courts. Poor Alan is at the mercy of his sprightly young Scottish barrister, whose taste for expensive restaurants makes deep inroads into the Captain’s recently acquired fortune. To complicate matters, Sophie, Alan’s delectable ward, is about to be wed to one of Lewrie’s former First Officers, another exceptionally costly event. And his American wife Caroline has been receiving detailed anonymous letters about Alan’s indiscretions, to which she gives credence. What a relief, then, to get through the trial (verdict to be announced much later) and the wedding (great event, but Caroline is not mollified) and sail off to the French Atlantic coast where His Majesty’s navy has sealed up the ports and throttled most of the commerce. Happy to find that he has increased authority and a handful of other ships to get adventurous with, Captain Lewrie takes a look at the vulnerabilities of Bonaparte’s local seaports and stretches what could have been a soporific assignment into a splendid dustup. All this is told in Lambdin’s usual mannered but amusing version of Regency English, which slows the pace, but not disagreeably.
Excellent amusement—Georgette Heyer for the gents.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-34805-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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
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