A treasure trove of early 20th-century political humor and social commentary still relevant today.
A book offers a collection of an American humorist’s vivid writings.
Van Meter (Tippecanoe and Tyler Too, 2008, etc.) focuses on the period after Finley Peter Dunne relocated from Chicago to New York City in 1900. Dunne is most famous for creating Martin Dooley—a wisecracking, middle-aged bar owner whose thoughts on a wide array of topics appeared in a transliterated Irish brogue throughout the nation via newspapers and magazines. Logically, Van Meter emphasizes the Dooley pieces in his overall selection of essays. In fact, according to the author, only three of the Dooley texts included in this collection have appeared in book form previously, and he accurately characterizes the bar owner’s voice in the preface: “His gruff concern, willing kindness, and skeptical thoughtfulness are always present alongside a clear eye for hypocrisy and unfairness.” Commenting on the lack of civil discourse during the 1912 presidential campaign, Dooley remarks, “Ivrybody callin’ each other liars an’ crooks not like pollytickal inimies, d’ye mind, but like old frinds that has been up late dhrinkin’ together.” Sound familiar? Wading through this dialect can be immensely challenging but is largely worth the effort. Van Meter believes that the non-Dooley writings lack a similar sense of playfulness, but many readers will probably welcome the break. Likewise, modern audiences should appreciate the author’s decision to boldface the names of the era’s prominent political figures and provide a supremely helpful glossary of names at the end of the text. Mr. Worldly Wiseman, another wonderful character, emerges from these pages, a pompous blowhard whom Van Meter aptly compares to the archconservative personage inhabited for many years by Stephen Colbert. “Wisey” criticizes environmental conservation efforts and insists that a businessman would make an ideal president. Beyond the expanded Dooley repertoire, this bloviating autocrat is a real discovery. Furthermore, enthusiasts of Teddy Roosevelt (“Tiddy Rosenfelt,” in Dooley’s words) should not miss this volume, as Dunne managed to maintain a friendship with him while simultaneously poking fun. Readers should enjoy the contemporaneous accounts of notable events (the death of Mark Twain, the women’s suffrage movement, the sinking of the Titanic) as well as more perennial topics (professional baseball, collegiate football, and women’s fashion). Van Meter may inspire skepticism with his use of the superlative in the book’s subtitle, but he certainly mounts a credible case.
A treasure trove of early 20th-century political humor and social commentary still relevant today.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5188-2712-9
Page Count: 436
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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