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
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
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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