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TAIKO

Name: TAIKO
Author: Eiji Yoshikawa
ISBN: 4-77001-570-4

by Eiji Yoshikawa ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 23, 1992

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A homely, clever boy from the provinces survives a cheerless childhood and, through diligence, high-quality work, and devotion to his employers, eventually unites 16th-century Japan and becomes the country's supreme ruler. Under the emperor, of course. The previous megawork by the late Yoshikawa (d. 1962), and the first to appear in the US, was Musashi (1981). Little Hiyoshi, whose unfortunate looks lead everyone to call him ``monkey,'' is the only son of a poor country samurai and a much put-upon mother. Not what we have come to think of as the model Japanese worker, Hiyoshi is the nail that sticks up and gets hammered, time and again, for his troubles. Farmed out to a series of craftsmen, the boy's uncontrolled tongue loses him job after job until he is reduced to itinerant needle sales. Eventually, he moves out of needles and into the samurai business, signing on with sundry busy warlords. A succession of weakened shoguns has resulted in total decentralization of power in Japan, and there is always somebody doing battle with somebody else. Hiyoshi moves up the assistant warlord career ladder until he at last hooks up with the brilliant Lord Nobunaga and becomes his right-hand man. The young, far from wealthy Nobunaga begins uniting province after province after province after province. Hiyoshi becomes more and more indispensable and is awarded better and better jobs and a succession of new, mildly confusing surnames. Years later, when Nobunaga is at last defeated by an old ally, Hiyoshi, now Hiyoshita, grabs the reins and continues the consolidation process until the samurai are all subjugated and the country is pacified in time for a nice golden age. Episodic, bloody, prim, and quite long. There are no helpful western interpreters, only a couple of references to missionaries and the Portuguese. Determined readers will find—buried under the hundreds of decapitated warriors—the roots of the present Japanese international business success, and the country's attitudes toward women, unions, etiquette, and suicide.

Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1992

ISBN: 4-77001-570-4

Page Count: 926

Publisher: Kodansha

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.