A philosophically charged critique of government, couched in the form of a novel.
A parable about a woman’s education in Washington politics, as she pursues a career full of frustrated hopes.
Gibney, the author of a study of evolution (Evolutionary Philosophy, 2012) and a short story writer, spent the bulk of his professional career working in the political beltway, pulling stints in the massive bureaucracies of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on that expertise, he offers a fictional examination of Washington’s perennial dysfunction. Justine Swensen arrives in the nation’s capital from Minnesota with strident, idealistic aspirations of government as an agent of social change. Intoxicated by a new senator’s promises to transform government for the better, she starts out as a staffer in his office, brimming with enthusiasm. However, she quickly learns that his promises are more rhetoric than reality, and she embarks on a career in various jobs in D.C. politics. Justine is serially disenchanted with the House Appropriations Committee, the Government Accountability Office, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Department of Homeland Security, to name a few. Each time, corruption and cynicism crush her high hopes; she even tries her luck in the private sector before finally running for office herself. This novel doubles as a sort of American civics textbook, explaining the functions of each agency while adding the spice of insider knowledge. It’s bookended with references to Ayn Rand’s brand of libertarianism, which provides philosophical power to the concluding moral: “In the private sector, you were able to see the futility of any single job in just a few years because your companies were so small and could fail so quickly,” Justine says. “The government though is so sprawling and so stable that it took me an entire career to just figure that out.” The book can be a bit didactic, as it’s somewhat heavy-handedly structured to provide a lesson in the grim reality of American politics. (The final chapter is even titled “The Moral of the Story.”) Still, its crisp dialogue (“Is lunch going to be enough or do I need to apologize for all of DC?”) and deep knowledge of Washington’s inner workings make it an edifying read.
A philosophically charged critique of government, couched in the form of a novel.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1492940098
Page Count: 214
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 30, 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
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