First printing of a novella-sized outtake from Michener's behemoth Texas (1985): the story of the revolution of 1836, which severed Texas from Mexico, and of the duel between firebrand Sam Houston's insurgent Texicans and a punitive Mexican army led by glory-mongering scoundrel Santa Anna. In a lengthy introduction, Michener explains the publishing history of this novel and of the sunburst of writing that produced ten books from him between 1986 and 1990. As an adventurous adolescent, the 6'2" Houston would escape from his family's Tennessee farm and go live with the Cherokee Indians, take on their ways and learn their language. Santa Anna meanwhile was born a Creole, soon became idled with dreams of military glory, joined the Mexican infantry, quickly rose to command in the cavalry and led his troops in rapacious attacks against Indians and revolutionaries who questioned the authority of the Spanish army. When rebels arose in the northern province of Tejas, Santa Anna crossed the Rio Grande to slay them. Earlier, Houston had become a teacher, a lawyer, fought beside General Andrew Jackson, represented the Cherokee in Washington for their treaty, and rose to major-general in the Tennessee Militia because of his commanding presence and oratorical gifts. With Mexico breaking away from Spain and crowning its own emperor, Santa Anna went through a sea-change, became an ardent republican and by 1836 had been four times President of Mexico. With Texas seceding, he marched 5,000 troops noah to confront Davy Crockett, Sam Bowie and their 184 Anglo invaders awaiting the Mexicans at the Alamo in San Antonio. After that slaughter, Houston's outnumbered men attacked Santa Anna at San Jacinto, slaying 600 Mexicans in 18 minutes. Exiled four times, Santa Anna went on to be Mexico's president 11 times, ceded incredible areas of Mexico to the States, and died a pauper but no hero. Rapid semifiction done in bold strokes, though not densely imagined.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1990
ISBN: 074931415X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: State House Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1990
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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