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POINT LOOKOUT

Name: POINT LOOKOUT
Author: Fredd Snell
ISBN: 978-1-973267-23-2

A CIVIL WAR STORY

by Fredd Snell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2017

An impressive blend of history and fiction in need of additional editing.

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Snell’s Civil War novel documents the savage treatment of prisoners of war.

George Corbett joins the 8th Virginia Cavalry in 1861 and reluctantly permits his 15-year-old son, Harley, to follow suit. In 1863, the two are separated in the fog of battle, and Harley is shot in the arm and taken prisoner by Union soldiers. He’s transported to Point Lookout, Maryland, and incarcerated in a prisoners-of-war camp, the conditions of which are ghastly. Prisoners routinely face physical abuse, starvation, and squalid filth. George, tortured by guilt over his son’s fate, becomes hopeful when he learns that Gen. Lee has hatched a covert plan to rescue the 20,000 POWs, a perilously risky venture made all the more dangerous when the Union soldiers discover it and prepare for the attack. The tide of war has turned against the South, and the Confederacy is in desperate need of soldiers. Harley is imprisoned with his Uncle Steve—nicknamed “Devil Steve” for his penchant for brutal violence. Steve undergoes macabre abuse by a former slave, Big Jake Brown, who became a Union soldier and guard at the camp. Jake was once ferociously beaten by Steve before he killed his owners and escaped, and he intends to exact retribution. Debut author Snell’s meticulous research is nothing short of remarkable. He studied official camp inspection reports, period memoirs, and even visited the historical sites in question in order to paint an authentic portrait of the prison’s barbarity. With the exception of Steve’s monstrously deformed character, the author paints a morally nuanced picture of both sides. George’s inner conflict is a good example of this authorial sensitivity. An educated Southerner, he can’t help but find slavery repugnant, but he still practices slavery and chooses to fight for the Confederacy. The novel reads like an uncorrected draft: the dialogue is written in historically appropriate dialect while the narration largely isn’t, though it lapses inexplicably into it occasionally. Also, while the table of contents provides pagination, the pages themselves are left unnumbered.

An impressive blend of history and fiction in need of additional editing.

Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-973267-23-2

Page Count: 431

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2018

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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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.).