paper 0-8165-1959-5 A slender but illuminating debut novel from Cherokee/Chickasaw poet and Oklahoma professor Hobson offers a sympathetic view of a Louisiana man who becomes the last of his kind, with the awful knowledge that no one will ever speak to him in his native tongue again. Looking back on his life from old age, the first years of the 20th century weren’t bad for Thomas Darko. Among other things, brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents all lived in what they called “Ofo Town,” with other, larger Indian groups as neighbors and relatives in good hunting and fishing country along the Mississippi. After dropping out of elementary school, Thomas even started to make a good living, first in the oilfields, then as a bootlegger. But as he prospered, his family, never huge, began to dwindle from a series of tragedies: One brother died in a New Jersey boot camp during the influenza epidemic of 1917, another in a knife fight, and his father’s spirit was crushed by the loss of his sons. Thomas’s reputation for first-rate moonshine during Prohibition extended to Texas and even Chicago, but the glory days ended in a raid in 1933 and he went off to jail. There, his high-maintenance wife Sally left him without a word, taking everything—and then the whole of his remaining family was killed when a freight train hit their truck. On his release he found years of solace in his whiskey, but by WWII, Thomas was sober and with the Marines in the Pacific, where he was his unit’s sole survivor in the assault on Japanese-held Tarawa. An empty time followed, until Smithsonian ethnographers asked him to record his language for posterity; that too proved a hollow endeavor, leaving the last of the Ofos to end his days alone. A compassionate sketch, and deceptively simple quiet study, that manages to put a human face on the sadly logical outcome of a national history of genocide.
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2000
ISBN: 0-8165-1958-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Univ. of Arizona
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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