Another triumph in the genre: Kelton, author of some 40 novels, holds a record seven Spur Awards.
Sixth and final (we think) entry in the Texas Rangers saga by Kelton.
Texas Vendetta (2004) brought into the 1870s the story begun in 1861 with The Buckskin Line (1999), when the raggle-taggle first Texas Rangers of Mexican Texas protected landowners from marauding Indians. The Indians are peaceful or gone now, but the Rangers still have business protecting Mexican-Americans from Texas-Americans and vice versa. Kelton starts out this time with immense laugh-out-loud humor, but phrases soon arise with cloudy hints that maybe it’s time for Ranger Andy Pickard, now 25, to pack in his badge (though a Ranger has no badge, unless he makes one for himself) and turn to thoughts of homesteading with Bethel Brackett. As it happens, he’s thrown in with fellow Ranger Farley Brackett, Bethel’s loutish, Mexican-hating brother, and with motormouth Len Tanner, and is posted to the still disputatious border country along the Rio Grande, where raids on each other’s stock are common between Texans and Mexicans. Along the way to their new post, the trio is bushwhacked for their horses but manage to drive off their attackers, killing one. The thieves, led by Burt Hatton, later bury their dead member, the hotheaded young nephew of the wife of their boss, cattleman (and rustler) Jericho Jackson. Jackson has a warning sign posted on his land: “This is Jericho’s road. Take the other.” He has fortified his ranch with a big wall, as in the story of Joshua in the Bible—and who will blow it down? Across the border in Mexico, Jericho’s rival is Guadalupe Chavez, who has a giant cattle ranch and rustles Jericho’s cattle, among others’. When Burt Hatton lies, telling Jericho that his wife’s hotheaded nephew was slain by Lupe Chavez, Jericho decides somehow to kill Chavez’s nephew, who works as a hand for Big Jim McCawley just north of the border. And so war erupts between Jericho and Chavez, with Rangers in the middle.
Another triumph in the genre: Kelton, author of some 40 novels, holds a record seven Spur Awards.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-30955-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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