Hot on the heels of the author's highly praised debut novel, Resurrection Man (1995), come two novellas, both conjuring up images of doomed love and quick, ugly death in Northern Ireland via McNamee's distinctive style of poetry and grit. In The Last of Deeds, a no-frills romance between a Catholic boy and a Protestant girl in a coastal town already shattered by ``the troubles'' sets in motion a series of violent events. Sharon and ``Mr. Nothing,'' as she calls him, want only to be alone together. But an ambush of Glennon, scion of the town's first family, prompts another assault, this one fatal. Sharon hides her lover in a net-filled shed on the pier, but while he's off with friend Deeds seeking vengeance, she's raped and abducted by Glennon. She wreaks her own revenge on her attacker, but not before matters take yet another ugly turn that leads to the death of Deeds. Love In History is a lesser (though still vivid) tale of women living in a town next to an airbase in the last days of WW II. While the US airmen dream of Betty Grable, they aren't averse to trading stockings with the locals for quickies along the base's perimeter fence. Bad luck follows some—e.g., Sadie, pregnant after being date-raped and dumped by her flyboy, nearly kills herself as a result; but for those like Adelene, a Grable look-alike lusted after by all—including the soap-box minister living next door in the boardinghouse—the chosen man proves to be a perfect gentleman. On the eve of his departure, however, when there's a chance he'll ask her to come back to the States with him, the pair's idyll is shattered by the violent actions of the deranged minister. Taut, tough situations, rendered with an unblinking eye- -stories that offer further proof of a formidable, durable talent.
Pub Date: Nov. 18, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14641-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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