A well-meaning if tepid debut, set during the waning years of Apache glory, about a medicine man who proves a threat to white designs for the Indians' containment. Based on the life of the historical Apache shaman Nakaidoklinni, the story opens with the healer as a young man, a member of a raiding party to Mexico. The raid successfully completed, the youth is a step closer to manhood in the tribe, but he diverges from the warrior's path when he has a vision in which a white wolf speaks to him, urging him to seek counsel with someone who can teach him about wolf power. A respected old medicine man takes him under his wing, training his apprentice in Apache ways of healing. White soldiers are becoming a permanent presence in rugged Apache country, restricting the Indians' movements and forcing them to abandon their Mexican raids. For a time the changes seem manageable, and the new shaman is able to marry, have a son, and gain the respect of his people, even traveling to Washington to meet President Grant as his band's representative. But as the Apache are increasingly forced to rely on US government rations, encouraged to turn against one another, and hunted down mercilessly if they refuse to submit to white authority, they begin to lose sight of who they are. In response to this bleak situation, Nakaidoklinni rallies his people with a hopeful vision of peaceful coexistence. He stages almost nonstop dances of healing to drive away the despair. Then the corrupt Indian agent, his stranglehold on the tribe threatened, persuades the Army to bring the shaman in for questioning. In the inevitable fight that ensues, both the man of hope and his movement are annihilated. A highly sympathetic view of the Apache way of life, but, since narrative concerns are sacrificed to details of tribal practice, the result is more interesting anthropology than compelling drama.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8061-2905-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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