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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.

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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

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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.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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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.).