Military historian Hoyt (Angels of Death, 1994, etc.) joins a long list of writers who've set out to explain exactly what happened at the Little Bighorn (for the most recent, see Earl Murray's Flaming Sky, p. 804), but his own account improves on none in either particulars or perspective. On June 25, 1876, Brevet General George Armstrong Custer and the 7th US Cavalry attacked a large encampment of Sioux and Cheyenne on the Little Bighorn River and were wiped out to a man. And though no eyewitness left any substantiated account, the event became the centerpiece of hundreds of examinations in print and film. Hoyt's version of the story is particularly mundane and even occasionally silly, running through the well-worn facts leading up to the military debacle, then tossing in a fanciful account of Custer's personal demise at the hands of a warrior named ``Big Muskrat.'' Writing more in the manner of a technical report with dialogue than of a novel or even ``novelization,'' Hoyt sprinkles military reports throughout for authenticity, but the dialogue exchanges seem like parody or material for a Saturday Night Live sketch. One running joke, for example, is Grant's and others' irritation that subordinates consistently use Custer's brevet ranknot exactly great comic material. Meanwhile, Grant comes off as an irascible but wise old man; Sherman and Sheridan sound like petulant fraternity boys. Hoyt concludes with a pedantic and generally incorrect assessment of the US government's Native American policies in the form of a ``historical note.'' Adequately researched, but pretentious and poorly presented, unworthy of its subject and of Hoyt's reputation.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85533-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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