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BUFFALO SPIRITS

Name: BUFFALO SPIRITS
Author: Elizabeth Black
ISBN: 1-58654-032-7

by Elizabeth Black ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 22, 2003

An impassioned debut, but the people get lost in the landscape.

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A middle-aged Chicago journalist revisits the Kansas plains of her childhood.

Chicago-based “nomad” and Tribune bigwig Rebecca Kluger perpetually jeopardizes her thriving career by jetting west without warning or vacation time. She’s usually on the trail of her elusive brother Tom, who prefers wilderness to kin, and the two finally reunite to return to descendants in Oklahoma the ancestral remains of members of the Nadi-ish-dena tribe, who once lived on land the Kluger family later farmed. First, however, Rebecca examines the bones of her own past in a first-person narrative pastiche that’s rich in anecdote but weak on sustained development. She zips through childhood, college, the move to Chicago, a few affairs, and her meteoric, seemingly effortless rise from cub reporter to foreign correspondent, all the while remaining spiritually tethered to her home state. (Black offers a moving, and justifiably tragic, depiction of the fate of the farmers, land, slaughtered buffalo, and feedlot-incarcerated cattle of the Great Plains.) The pace slows abruptly once Rebecca finds Tom; our heroine does less summarizing and more storytelling, but still tends to “report” her emotions. Meanwhile, her fellow characters rarely manage to elbow Rebecca aside long enough to enact an entire scene, but a few get to have their say nonetheless. Interspersed with Rebecca’s chronicle are monologues by long-dead but still talkative Nadi-ish-dena, who give their own accounts of the West’s shameful history. These passages are often engrossing—one woman’s “journey to the other side of the Sun” to visit Louis XV’s court is especially dizzying—but they also contain clunkers like “He carried the wisdom of eagles in his heart.” The parallel narratives and their characters intertwine with increasing frequency, and while some of the resulting coincidences are unpredictable, others will strain the credulity even of readers willing to grant the guidance of the spirit world.

An impassioned debut, but the people get lost in the landscape.

Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2003

ISBN: 1-58654-032-7

Page Count: 359

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003

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.