A sequel to Thunder in the Dawn (1993, not reviewed) offers yet another version of Custer's Last Stand, as told by a fictional white eyewitness. In the summer of 1876, George Armstrong Custer and the 7th US Calvary rode to destruction at the hands of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the combined Sioux and Cheyenne Nations. No whites survived, but writers have ever since sought to explain how such a disaster could have happened. Adam Garret, hero of this newest version, is a lantern-jawed, fearless undercover journalist commissioned by Ulysses S. Grant to dig up dirt on political rival Custer. Although he's never been west before, Garret quickly adapts and becomes a better warrior than the Indians. He kills and scalps a Sioux brave almost before we have his name. Garret does not ``go native''as does his fiancÇe's brother, Mason Hall, an army deserterbut maintains drawing-room manners while developing a heightened sensitivity to the Indian's plight. Meanwhile, his fiancÇe has come west in pursuit of both lover and brother. Plodding earnestly through the leadings-up to Little Big Horn, the story is punctuated by redundant, wooden dialogue in which everyone, including rustics, speaks with perfect grammar in complete sentences. Overwritten, repetitive letters also keep the pace slow, while historical figures are accurately but broadly drawn, never quite penetrating legendary facades: Custer is egocentric, cruel, ambitious, and a bore; Libby, his wife, appears childlike and long-suffering; Crazy Horse is seen as a noble but misguided idealist. The massacre itself is so subordinated to the plot as to be virtually anticlimactic. Only those who've never read an account of the Little Big Horn debacle will find this romantic, revisionist interpretation plausible. Murray's done his homework (a very limited bibliography is included), but western fiction aficionados will find this account of Custer's Last Stand naive and shopworn.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85915-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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PERSPECTIVES
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