DRIVERS AT THE SHORT-TIME MOTEL

Name: DRIVERS AT THE SHORT-TIME MOTEL
Author: Eugene Gloria
ISBN: 0-14-058925-2

by Eugene Gloria ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2000

Gloria’s poetry is rich in everyday detail, yet the experiences he relates are pertinent to more than a Filipino-American...

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Gloria, who received a Fulbright Fellowship in 1992, was born in Manila and grew up in San Francisco. This collection was selected as one of the National Poetry Series winners in 1999, and most of the poems were published previously in a variety of literary periodicals and anthologies. As is often the case with those who straddle the boundary between cultures, between past and present, and between urban and rural sensibilities, Gloria shifts from one frame of reference to the other. He does so with an easy grace, in the manner of a child who slips unconsciously from speaking one language with friends to another with grandparents. But this apparent fluidity and careless ambidexterity mask a deeper wound: the pain felt by those in exile, by those who find their way around in two different places but are at home in neither. “If there were two worlds we are made to inhabit,” the poet admits, “I would prefer the one I was forced to leave.” His verses are filled with likable and memorable souls: his grandmother, who sagely declares that “every culture’s worst enemy is its own people,” a mechanic on his way to a lovers’ rendezvous who is cut down by a bullet through his heart. There is the “tight-fisted dowager” who rises every day at six o’clock for Mass and the “women in heavy make-up [who] wait in well-worn dresses” outside the US military base at Subic Bay.

Gloria’s poetry is rich in everyday detail, yet the experiences he relates are pertinent to more than a Filipino-American audience. The exile of which he writes is our diaspora from Eden and the lost connections to our past.

Pub Date: June 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-14-058925-2

Page Count: 96

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

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Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).

All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."

Pub Date: April 8, 1974

ISBN: 0385086954

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

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New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

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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.