A treasure trove of early 20th-century political humor and social commentary still relevant today.
A book offers a collection of an American humorist’s vivid writings.
Van Meter (Tippecanoe and Tyler Too, 2008, etc.) focuses on the period after Finley Peter Dunne relocated from Chicago to New York City in 1900. Dunne is most famous for creating Martin Dooley—a wisecracking, middle-aged bar owner whose thoughts on a wide array of topics appeared in a transliterated Irish brogue throughout the nation via newspapers and magazines. Logically, Van Meter emphasizes the Dooley pieces in his overall selection of essays. In fact, according to the author, only three of the Dooley texts included in this collection have appeared in book form previously, and he accurately characterizes the bar owner’s voice in the preface: “His gruff concern, willing kindness, and skeptical thoughtfulness are always present alongside a clear eye for hypocrisy and unfairness.” Commenting on the lack of civil discourse during the 1912 presidential campaign, Dooley remarks, “Ivrybody callin’ each other liars an’ crooks not like pollytickal inimies, d’ye mind, but like old frinds that has been up late dhrinkin’ together.” Sound familiar? Wading through this dialect can be immensely challenging but is largely worth the effort. Van Meter believes that the non-Dooley writings lack a similar sense of playfulness, but many readers will probably welcome the break. Likewise, modern audiences should appreciate the author’s decision to boldface the names of the era’s prominent political figures and provide a supremely helpful glossary of names at the end of the text. Mr. Worldly Wiseman, another wonderful character, emerges from these pages, a pompous blowhard whom Van Meter aptly compares to the archconservative personage inhabited for many years by Stephen Colbert. “Wisey” criticizes environmental conservation efforts and insists that a businessman would make an ideal president. Beyond the expanded Dooley repertoire, this bloviating autocrat is a real discovery. Furthermore, enthusiasts of Teddy Roosevelt (“Tiddy Rosenfelt,” in Dooley’s words) should not miss this volume, as Dunne managed to maintain a friendship with him while simultaneously poking fun. Readers should enjoy the contemporaneous accounts of notable events (the death of Mark Twain, the women’s suffrage movement, the sinking of the Titanic) as well as more perennial topics (professional baseball, collegiate football, and women’s fashion). Van Meter may inspire skepticism with his use of the superlative in the book’s subtitle, but he certainly mounts a credible case.
A treasure trove of early 20th-century political humor and social commentary still relevant today.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5188-2712-9
Page Count: 436
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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