BACKWARD-FACING MAN

Name: BACKWARD-FACING MAN
Author: Don Silver
ISBN: 0-06-081928-6

by Don Silver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2005

Silver’s narrative gets a little crowded and textbookish at times, but for those who remember the days of Tania and Cinque,...

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“America loves to watch someone’s life disintegrate,” writes debut novelist Silver in a narrative brimming with crises and explosives.

For all Stardust Nadia knows, her mom is just another survivor of the ’60s, her dad some nameless dude out of the Woodstock generation. Stardust’s curiosity about both parents rises several notches when mother Lorraine, an elegant woman with connections to the radical left, disappears while on an alpine skiing holiday; her frozen body is recovered—or is it hers?—at just about the time graybeard ponytail types start showing up to tell Stardust about the good-old/bad-old days of countercultural yore. Stardust, bright but a touch misdirected, as any Telemachus must be, isn’t above turning a few tricks to pay the bills; neither is she shy of hooking up with some of the latter-day New Left types who haunt John Ashcroft’s dreams, and whose escapades parallel the journeys of the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Lorraine suspects that there’s a rogue government plot afoot to bust Patty Hearst anew, which would end her bid for a presidential pardon as Clinton prepares to leave office at the dawn of the new millennium; from her we learn that “the whole SLA thing was a government setup,” a not-implausible scenario. The plot thickens as various elements of movements old and new play cat-and-mouse with the feds, who are not very nice. The omniscient narrator of this tale, too young to have firsthand memory of the time, is full of didactic pointers on the meaning of the blissful ’60s and the ugly ’70s.

Silver’s narrative gets a little crowded and textbookish at times, but for those who remember the days of Tania and Cinque, his tale rings true.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-06-081928-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

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.