by Dori Sanders ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1993
Sanders (the well-received Clover, 1990) returns with a life story that seems to hum along so simply it takes a while to notice that it resonates as powerfully as an old hymn. Mae Lee Barnes grows up on a small South Carolina farm, marries young, and gives birth to five children. When her husband abandons her, she carries on, expanding her farmland, handpicking cotton in the fields, and stashing her money in hiding places around the house. After her children are grown and successfully launched, Mae Lee moves from the farm to a new house in town and, at her son's urging, volunteers as the first black woman on the hospital auxiliary. It's the stuff of a simple life, and Sanders doesn't dress it up with any unnecessary heroics or hyperbole- -although, occasionally, her strong, clear prose slides into an intrusive journalese (``The civil rights revolution, spreading across the South, opened the way for Mae Lee Barnes's dream of educating her children beyond high school, in college''). Mostly, though, the language holds, and the small details, the homely miracles of everyday life, give this story its eloquence. Mae Lee is no crusader, but her tea parties with her hospital co-workers are a civil rights revolution in themselves. She's no comedian, but when she sits on her porch exchanging sharp remarks with best friend Ellabelle, it's hard not to laugh out loud. She's stubborn, crafty, ladylike, and loving—the best of anybody's grandmother. She'd object to being called a heroine, but, secretly, it would please her. Small, sharp truths and day-to-day details add up to a story that's larger than life here—that's the cipher of fine writing.
Pub Date: May 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-56512-027-2
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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