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
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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