It's the hero's wiles, not his conventional musings or the stolid love of wife and son, that make this novel of recent American history sporadically engrossing. Carroll (Firebird, 1988, etc.) opens his novel in the Chicago stockyards in 1939 and focuses on Sean Dillon, an Irish Catholic going to law-school at night and determined to rise out of working-class drudgery. In his most powerful writing, Carroll paints as ugly a picture of the stockyards as Upton Sinclair's in the muckraking era. Sean falls in love with Cass, the woman who becomes his wife, when he helps her investigate her uncle's murder, and he proves he can think on his feet by tricking the gangland perpetrator into a lifetime prison sentence. He again displays his ingenuity by planting misinformation on the intended site of the European invasion when he works for the FBI in WW II Washington. Made head of Air Force counterintelligence, and despised by the brass as an outsider, Sean employs his cunning to save a general framed for bribery. At the climax, during the Vietnam War, he is a four-star general, head of all military intelligence. The 483-page story reaches its moral crux when once again he uses his wits, this time to defend his only son, Richard, a war resister, against a draft-dodging charge. But the soul-searching by father and son in their conflict over the war would be more compelling if the son were less a stick figure. Sean's wife-loving, patient, and very Catholic-also seems contrived. Three decades of America life in the mid-20th century well dramatized when the hero is in action at centers of power, but insufficiently probing when he pauses to think or feel.
Pub Date: May 10, 1991
ISBN: 0-395-51136-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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