A ferocious portrait of the Civil War’s human toll. Dann (The Memory Cathedral, 1995, etc.) isn’t much concerned here with causes or outcomes. His gruesome chronicle of the suffering of 14-year-old Edmund McDowell, caught up in the efforts of —Stonewall— Jackson to defeat a Federal Army in 1862, is clearly intended to remind us that the Civil War was as brutal as any other war. Mundy disobeys his minister father and goes in search of a skirmish, hoping to watch his hero Stonewall chase the Yankees out of his valley. Instead he stumbles into the midst of a rout, finds the body of a longtime acquaintance who had been searching for him, and arrives home in time to see Union deserters shoot his father and rape and murder his mother. Sick and disoriented, Mundy wanders in and out of the battle lines. Made a prisoner, he’s compelled for a time to work in a Union field hospital, witnessing almost unimaginable horrors. Escaping, he falls in briefly with a band of renegade slaves, and after leaving them becomes the companion of a deranged Confederate cavalryman. Despite Mundy’s efforts to escape both his memories and the ever-widening war zone, he inevitably finds himself back in the middle of the slaughter. There is no doubt that Dann captures, in a way few other novelists have, the sheer bloody chaos of battle in the Civil War. Scenes of carnage and madness—with Mundy ravaged by fever, prone to hallucinations, or convulsed by grief—linger in the mind. But the conceit of writing the book as Mundy’s memoirs doesn’t work; it isn’t likely that any 19th-century teenager would have said all the things Mundy does here. And the narrative is finally too long, too repetitive, as if the author didn—t trust the reader to grasp how awful war is. Still, Dann’s anger, and his portrait of combat’s sheer horrors, make for a vivid—and disturbing—read.
Pub Date: July 13, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-09716-4
Page Count: 301
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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