bookshelf

THE HEAVENLY WORLD SERIES

Name: THE HEAVENLY WORLD SERIES
Author: Frank O’Rourke
ISBN: 0-7867-0950-2

TIMELESS BASEBALL FICTION

by Frank O’Rourke ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

To baseball what Thomas Kinkade is to cottages.

bookshelf

Sixteen previously published tales, including five that have never appeared in book form, from veteran O’Rourke (1916–89), who, during the 1940s and ’50s, wrote more than a hundred short stories, including westerns.

The question is how many times can the drama of a washed-up baseball player’s last great game be recycled? Quite a few, it seems. These are tall tales that put baseball in among breadlines, work shortages, and the backbreaking labor of the Depression and war years. In “Home Game,” a son contemplates his father’s baseball career, his insane love for our apparently existential pastime. A battle of immortal titans is arranged on a celestial field of dreams in the title story, while in “Look for the Kid with the Guts,” an aging scout attends a bush-league game to eyeball an inflation-spoiled prospect—only to find his attention drawn to an earnest other. “The Last Pitch” concerns a washed-up pitcher who digs deep to put the capper on his protracted career, and in “Flashing Spikes,” a young shortstop learns about honor from his counterpart in a small-town game. It’s not long before the imaginative pool starts to seem limited: all triple-A outfields are pocked with gopher holes, and everyone’s hands are gnarled like old-time catchers’. There are only so many ways to steer the drama through nine innings with the game and one’s career on the line, and sometimes the play-by-play reads as dryly as the inning-by-inning recap below newspaper box-scores. Still, there’s a tenderness toward the subject that’s seductive, and if it becomes tedious we perhaps shouldn’t blame an author who, after all, didn’t select these particular stories himself.

To baseball what Thomas Kinkade is to cottages.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-7867-0950-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

bookshelf

Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

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.