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BRIDESHEAD REVISITED

Name: BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
Author: Evelyn Waugh
ISBN: 0316042994

by Evelyn Waugh ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 2, 1945

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Here's perhaps the first chance we have had to make Waugh an item for big sales. Contradictory as it may sound, this may well be the most popular book Waugh has written and at the same time the most serious. There is none of the intense if sterile brilliance of his earlier books — their world of sybaritic pleasures and empty lives. Here, if unobtrusively, is the corrective of faith — Waugh, as did Huxley, has turned from nihilism to belief — in this case that of the Catholic Church. This is the story of the rich, the beautiful and the damned Marchmains, as told by Charles Ryder who revisited their home, Brides-head, in the war years. Here was his first introduction to the Marchmains, when at Oxford with Sebastian, the second son, Sebastian who was eccentric, exquisite, appealing, who drank to escape bondage to his mother, the pious, ascetic Lady Marchmain, who drove her husband from her in much the same way. Sebastian was never to lose the need for alcoholic excess, but his Catholic conscience, implanted in the nursery, reappeared at intervals during his last, lost years in Morocco. This is also the story of Julia, his sister, Julia who defied the Church and married vulgar, bombastic, monted, divorced Rex Mottram, and then ten years later met Ryder again and fell in love with him. When each secured divorce, she refused to marry him because of the shadow of papal disapproval. Such is the outline of the story. The details, particularly in the Oxford years of Sebastian and Ryder, have much of the graceful, astringent satire one associates with Waugh; the latter half, with the disintegration of Sebastian, the abnegation of Julia, is saddening even though Waugh does not wholly convince one with the validity of the Catholic viewpoint. And not to be forgotten, there is the fascination of the fluent facility of Waugh's prose, shaped by a practised observation and a civilised intellect.... This for your sophisticated readers. — B.O.M. for January.

Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1945

ISBN: 0316042994

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1945

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LETTERS OF NANCY MITFORD AND EVELYN WAUGH
by Nancy Mitford & Evelyn Waugh

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ESSAYS, ARTICLES AND REVIEWS OF EVELYN WAUGH
edited by Donat Gallagher & by Evelyn Waugh

- BOOK REVIEW
CHARLES RYDER'S SCHOOL DAYS AND OTHER STORIES
by Evelyn Waugh

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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.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 068487122X

Page Count: 872

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).