THE WITNESS OF ST. ANSGAR’S

Name: THE WITNESS OF ST. ANSGAR’S
Author: Francis W. Nielsen
ISBN: 1-58642-100-X

by Francis W. Nielsen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 7, 2006

A lovely book that deserves comparison with Giovanni Guareschi’s portrayal of country priest Don Camillo and J.F. Powers’s...

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The life of a Manhattan Catholic parish throughout the 1930s and after is lovingly etched in this posthumously published semi-autobiographical novel.

At its center is a rich characterization of Friar Benigno (born Joseph Zoller), a priest at St. Ansgar’s (located in a West Side “Dutchie” neighborhood) who’s being honored for 60 years of service. Nielsen (a television producer, actor and author of two pseudonymously published earlier novels) sticks close to the viewpoint of Mario, the adoring kid who serves as Friar Benigno’s altar boy and “assistant,” protégé and sounding-board, and recipient of both Benigno’s hard-won wisdom and his down-to-earth stories—rendered in a delightful, ethnically inflected fractured English (e.g., “St. Francis he don’t move uptown like the rich people. . . . He don’t rob and steal and crook”). Benigno’s firm adherence to the virtues (of poverty, chastity and obedience), preached by his beloved Francis of Assisi, see him—and Mario—through such crises as the debate over whether to pray for the soul of a deceased “gangster”; mourning a presumed suicide who may in fact have only fled from his black-widow fiancée; dealing with Father Blaise (who plays organ too loudly for the choir’s liking), handsome Father Roland (who attracts previously irreligious female communicants) and efficiency-expert martinet Father Guardianus; and—in the novel’s best episode—dealing with the stoical grief of Tommy Hunding, a devoted caregiver to his younger brothers, even after one of them, a heartless drunk, marries Tommy’s girlfriend. These often very funny episodes are moderated beautifully by Mario’s confusion over whether to enter the priesthood or serve his country by fighting against Hitler, as well as the choice he makes, the ordeal he endures and the comfortingly familiar “miracle” that resolves his dilemma.

A lovely book that deserves comparison with Giovanni Guareschi’s portrayal of country priest Don Camillo and J.F. Powers’s memorable tales of fallibly human clerics. Arguably, in fact, a minor classic.

Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006

ISBN: 1-58642-100-X

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Steerforth

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

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When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.