A substantial life-and-times novel.
Wilson’s memoir chronicles the life and times of an ordinary man.
“Yes, I made mistakes,” says Wilton Latso at the beginning of Wilson’s readable, unassuming nonfiction debut. “Who hasn’t?” In the course of the nearly 500 pages that follow, Wilton remembers and retells the story of his life, from his birth in a small town in Missouri to his youth in the rough housing projects of St. Louis, where his parents moved to find work. Wilton recalls a fairly normal, non-Norman Rockwell childhood growing up with his younger sister and brother, and he doesn’t shy away from narrating the grimmer aspects of those years, from grade-school bullies to the growing enmity between his parents (“They were Christians. They were supposed to forgive each other,” he observes. “What could they have possibly done wrong to each other?”). Wilton is an outgoing boy who turns into an outgoing young man, someone who makes friends—and eventually falls in love—easily. By the time he’s 20, he has a wife, three kids and a job he dislikes, but the author’s steady narrative hand prevents the amassing details from becoming too tedious. We follow Wilton and his friends and family through the middle years of the 20th century, watch as they drink and smoke dope and fight each other and reconcile. Through it all, we see Wilton himself grow wiser and more candid about the way he’s chosen to live his life: “A life without boredom often means a lot of mistakes.” He moves from job to job, always trying to balance having a good time with being a decent, responsible guy, and Wilson does a sure-handed, efficient job of layering the events of the larger world into his characters’ lives. We see them frightened by Vietnam and disillusioned by the Nixon administration, and we see them sometimes subsumed by the recreational drug culture of the ’70s. As the cast grows older (and expands with grandchildren), there’s an enjoyable sense of having watched these people grow and—sometimes reluctantly—mature.
A substantial life-and-times novel.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692026489
Page Count: 480
Publisher: DD Wilson Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
