A muddled collection, unsatisfying formally and as a coherent political/spiritual statement.
A second collection of poems fails to live up to its self-announced aspirations.
A slim volume composed almost equally of poems, authorial notes and photographs, Farpoint Mindstation II begins with Huff noting that he's included "some of the classics" from his first volume, Farpoint Mindstation I. Unfortunately, the subsequent volume fails to live up to that designation. The first poem, "A Wasted Life," is a clear indictment of Israeli policy, but the terzanelle form requires repetitions of the line "fetid vapors of forgotten objects assault the nose." However, it gains nothing with each iteration, since the heavy-handed viewpoint is clear from the start. Many of the other poems are innocuous if clichè. "Day of the Dunes" reminds us that in the desert, "Where gold is worthless, water is the currency of life." However, readers may find the sentiment of "Green Tea Under the Oak Tree" valuable, with lines like "when the ice melts the tea becomes weak and uninteresting" as a metaphor for the necessity of living intensely. It's also difficult to object to a Vietnam vet writing about war, no matter how unenlightening the results. Far more of the poems, however, style themselves in the libertarian mode of being politically incorrect (one poem is even dedicated to "political incorrectness"), and are both didactic and unenlightening, preaching to those who similarly find themselves worrying that saying "peace be onto you" is somehow going to incur the wrath of those in charge of "this verbal selectness." Tired would-be satirical terms, such as "poli-parrot" and "bureau-critter," are especially wearisome. Huff claims that his "many un-politically correct poems" show him to be an "evolutionary" rather than "revolutionary," someone seeking "change over a long period of time by using the tools of persuasion," but what he offers is little more than weak Zen and a hatred for bureaucracy.
A muddled collection, unsatisfying formally and as a coherent political/spiritual statement.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-1425181048
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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