Good old-fashioned snickering sexism generally hides behind closed doors these days, so it's with a sense of growing wonder that one slogs one's way through the veteran Denker's Dial-A-Diatribe, starring Judge Harry Spencer, Great Brontosaurus of the Federal bench. "Young woman, this Court takes judicial notice that all women have breasts. Even female attorneys. There is no need to flaunt them in my courtroom. So this Court can concentrate on your argument, you go home and put on a bra. With my limited experience in these matters, I would say a thirty-six C cup should do nicely." That's our hero, Federal District Court Judge Spencer, a cranky, cantankerous, gruff, but fair-minded—such is the author's painful misapprehension—old jurist who has just admonished a woman lawyer he believes is dressed for a "TV jiggle show" (a word to the wise in chambers is not Harry's style). The Women's Bar Association (naturally led by "an Amazon of a spinster in her mid-forties, tall, robust, attired in a quite masculine grey flannel suit") wants him to apologize, but there stands Spencer like a stone wall, so his old enemy, Chief Justice August Cartwright, takes advantage of the ensuing brouhaha to try to force him into retirement. Unabashed, Harry goes on about the business of trying Stockwell v. The State, a class-action suit claiming wage discrimination against female employees. Spencer finds the doctrine of Comparable Worth absurd and threatening (and Denker's stacked-deck version of it certainly is), so he writes a sarcastic opinion, and yet finds for the plaintiff, feeling certain higher courts will overrule him. But those crazed libbers at NOW (represented by actress/feminist/ exercise tycoon "Joan Esty") are too dumb to understand his deceptive plans, and Spencer coyly doesn't enlighten them when he flies out to L.A. to receive their Man of the Year Award. In fact, the gals find him such a charming old coot that they inundate August Cartwright and his buddies with letters, and Harry's job is saved. Back in the office, in an expansive mood, Harry reminisces with his secretary: "God, Betsy, remember this case? Esther Freihofer v. Acme Tool and Die. Clear case of reverse discrimination. Claimed she was held up to ridicule because she was the only girl in the office her boss never made a pass at." Shallow and tendentious. Strictly for cracker-barrel cacklers.
Pub Date: April 1, 1986
ISBN: 0688063861
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1986
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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
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