JUSTICE FOR NONE

Name: JUSTICE FOR NONE
Author: Gene Hackman
ISBN: 0-312-32425-1

by Gene Hackman & Daniel Lenihan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2004

Great small-town period detail with standard-issue courtroom scenes, a few too many stock characters, and an appropriately...

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Absorbing but by-the-numbers courtroom melodrama, with all the moral complexities, last-minute revelations, and gavel-pounding histrionics that the genre requires.

The Wake of the Perdido Star (1999), actor Hackman’s debut fiction with his underwater archaeologist writing partner Lenihan, was a high-seas swashbuckler that, if not for Patrick O’Brian, could have been called the kind of novel nobody writes anymore. The team’s second historical tale recalls classic American courtroom thrillers from To Kill a Mockingbird to Intruder in the Dust, but is closer to John Grisham's recent Faulkner-Lite efforts. Though set in 1929 in a nostalgically described Illinois hamlet, the story of Boyd Carter, a hapless trolley car operator on trial for the shooting murder of his wife and her loathsome lover, reads more like an extended metaphor of America’s loss of moral center after the Vietnam War. Boyd is a severely shell-shocked WWI vet whose grim experiences included the mercy killing of a critically wounded officer and the use of a corpse to shield himself from capture during the Battle of Argonne. Like the ’Nam vets who could not pick up the pieces of their prewar lives, Boyd has become a permanent outsider to all but a few who think they know him better than he knows himself. The central question here—how much can we really know our neighbors?—fades away as the authors bring on the usual elements of courtroom melodrama, with mostly stock characters reciting familiar lines. Exceptions are the defiant black prisoner Boyd befriends and the wounded, wonderfully compassionate Major Hennessey, administrator of the town’s Soldiers Home, whom Hackman must play if this is ever filmed.

Great small-town period detail with standard-issue courtroom scenes, a few too many stock characters, and an appropriately bitter twist ending.

Pub Date: June 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-312-32425-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WAKE OF THE PERDIDO STAR
by Gene Hackman with Daniel Lenihan

- IN THE NEWS
Gene Hackman, Actor and Author, Dies at 95

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THE GRAPES OF WRATH

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 1939

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This is the sort of book that stirs one so deeply that it is almost impossible to attempt to convey the impression it leaves. It is the story of today's Exodus, of America's great trek, as the hordes of dispossessed tenant farmers from the dust bowl turn their hopes to the promised land of California's fertile valleys. The story of one family, with the "hangers-on" that the great heart of extreme poverty sometimes collects, but in that story is symbolized the saga of a movement in which society is before the bar. What an indictment of a system — what an indictment of want and poverty in the land of plenty! There is flash after flash of unforgettable pictures, sharply etched with that restraint and power of pen that singles Steinbeck out from all his contemporaries. There is anger here, but it is a deep and disciplined passion, of a man who speaks out of the mind and heart of his knowledge of a people. One feels in reading that so they must think and feel and speak and live. It is an unresolved picture, a record of history still in the making. Not a book for casual reading. Not a book for unregenerate conservative. But a book for everyone whose social conscience is astir — or who is willing to face facts about a segment of American life which is and which must be recognized. Steinbeck is coming into his own. A new and full length novel from his pen is news. Publishers backing with advertising, promotion aids, posters, etc. Sure to be one of the big books of the Spring. First edition limited to half of advance as of March 1st. One half of dealer's orders to be filled with firsts.

Pub Date: April 14, 1939

ISBN: 0143039431

Page Count: 532

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1939

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
STEINBECK IN VIETNAM
by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden

- BOOK REVIEW
STEINBECK
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERICA AND AMERICANS
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson

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WASHINGTON BLACK

by Esi Edugyan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2018

A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.

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High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.

It's 1830 on the island of Barbados, and a 12-year-old slave named George Washington Black wakes up every hot morning to cruelties administered to him and other black men, women, and children toiling on a sugar plantation owned by the coldblooded Erasmus Wilde. Christopher, one of Erasmus’ brothers, is a flamboyant oddball with insatiable curiosity toward scientific matters and enlightened views on social progress. Upon first encountering young Wash, Christopher, also known as Titch, insists on acquiring him from his brother as his personal valet and research assistant. Neither Erasmus nor Wash is pleased by this transaction, and one of the Wildes' cousins, the dour, mysterious Philip, is baffled by it. But then Philip kills himself in Wash’s presence, and Christopher, knowing the boy will be unjustly blamed and executed for the death, activates his hot air balloon, the Cloud-cutter, to carry both himself and Wash northward into a turbulent storm. So begins one of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled as Wash and Titch lose their balloon but are carried the rest of the way to America by a ship co-captained by German-born twins of wildly differing temperaments. Once in Norfolk, Virginia, they meet with a sexton with a scientific interest in dead tissue and a moral interest in ferrying other runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad. Rather than join them on their journey, Wash continues to travel with Titch for a reunion with the Wildes' father, an Arctic explorer, north of Canada. Their odyssey takes even more unexpected turns, and soon Wash finds himself alone and adrift in the unfamiliar world as “a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind…running, always running from the dimmest of shadows.” Canadian novelist Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues, 2012, etc.) displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters in spinning this yarn, and the reader’s expectations are upended almost as often as her hero’s.

A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.