BUFFALO BOY AND GERONIMO

Name: BUFFALO BOY AND GERONIMO
Author: James Janko
ISBN: 1-931896-19-4

by James Janko ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2006

An anti-war novel certainly, but very much its own kind. Pervasively melancholy, folkloric in approach, it’s sustained by...

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A beautifully written first novel about the ugliness of war—in Vietnam and anywhere else.

It’s 1970, and circumstances surrounding the life of 14-year-old Mong, Buffalo Boy, are harrowing, a consequence of the lethal attention emanating from Cu Chi, the main base of the 25th Infantry Division. Whether from the air (saturation bombing) or on the ground (napalm attacks), there has been destruction enough to cost Mong his father; in fact, no one in his village has escaped grievous loss. And yet, Mong, astride his buffalo Great Joy, feels empowered, transcending a reality composed of “scarred earth, of green rice fields burned, of trees and huts burned, ravaged.” Moreover, Mong has managed to fall in love—with Thien, also 14, whose breasts and hips fill his imagination with poetry. In the 25th Division, there’s another boy, only slightly older, Antonio Lucio Conchola, who calls himself Geronimo, a talismanic name from which he derives a sense of invulnerability. Geronimo has poetry in him, too, but war and killing have made him unnervingly strange, a condition that alienates him from his comrades. In that half-mad state, he has an almost otherworldly encounter with a tiger, perceiving the great beast as Blake did—burning bright. As a result, he decides that his only sensible course is to resign from the war, permanently. He wanders away from his platoon, eventually to be taken prisoner by Mongo. It’s an odd captivity, noticeably deficient in malice or enmity. It is as if, across the cultural and racial divide, the boys have somehow achieved an iota of affinity.

An anti-war novel certainly, but very much its own kind. Pervasively melancholy, folkloric in approach, it’s sustained by prose that is often lyrical, though never self-conscious.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006

ISBN: 1-931896-19-4

Page Count: 124

Publisher: Curbstone Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

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THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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ONE DAY IN DECEMBER

by Josie Silver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 16, 2018

Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...

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True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.

On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.

Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.