Fine work by an author who seems to be making a specialty of excavating the American past for its ecological ramifications...
The author of Letters from Yellowstone (1999) crafts another reflective historical, this one about an 1876 fossil-hunting foray into Montana.
Looking back on this eventful expedition 43 years later, as she goes through paintings and drawings made there by her friend, elderly artist Augustus Starwood, scientific illustrator Eleanor Peterson recalls the motley crew assembled by a mysterious “Captain” from Yale. Among them are expedition leader Patrick Lear, one of several characters scarred by his Civil War experiences, and his friend James Huntington, a wealthy collector entranced by the West’s natural wonders and native cultures. Starwood falls in love with this new landscape too, purchasing a teepee, letting his white hair flow loose, and quoting Shakespeare all the while. Peterson is more reserved, anxious to perform to the Captain’s exacting specifications (he’s notorious for stealing credit from his subordinates, but she hopes her work will win her a job at Yale). She too lost something crucial during the war (a dead fiancé is suggested) and is looking for a safe harbor, not a grand vista. Yet her warm relationship with Huntington, who’s engaged but obviously drawn to her, opens her heart to the wilderness. The quiet development of this and several other intriguing relationships is somewhat at odds with a melodramatic plot involving the discovery of a Triceratops fossil and a mountain cave-in. Forgettable are the lurking rival paleontologists and other ne’er-do-wells who muddy the action, but readers will remember Smith’s more inventive creations: the medic, cashiered from the army for exposing inhumane conditions, who now wears Indian garb and travels with a bear; Leary’s conflict between his religious faith and his belief in Darwinian theory; Huntington’s rueful acknowledgment that he finds the world of his imagination more compelling than the real one.
Fine work by an author who seems to be making a specialty of excavating the American past for its ecological ramifications and spiritual yearnings.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03129-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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