A story of honor and revenge that unites modern sentiments and genre traditions.
A Western in the classic mode, full of gunfights, revenge, questions of honor and the bonds men form in a precarious world.
Brothers Red and Doc Whitfield return to Montana—older brother Red from the West, where he has made his fortune cooking for gold-seekers, and Doc from the East, where he’s just finished medical training—to rescue their mother, Yellow Bird, from Ross Butcher, who has taken over their ranch and is treating her as a prisoner. The brothers are willing to cede the ranch to Butcher in exchange for their mother, but their plan becomes more complicated when they find out Yellow Bird has disappeared. After Doc delivers a baby and brings about a reconciliation between an estranged father and son-in-law—and then survives a raid by some of Butcher’s men—he and Red, along with a cowboy named Sinful and Big John Warner, just released from prison after Butcher framed him for robbery, set off with two goals: Kill Butcher and find Yellow Bird. The friendships and loyalties that develop among the ad hoc posse, as well as the friends and enemies they meet along the way, add emotional depth. Also notable is the book’s celebration of the era’s weaponry: Doc’s ability to fire his Colt before anyone realizes he’s drawn his weapon, the value of a Henry rifle for defense, Sinful’s ability to hit any target with his “Arkansas toothpick.” Despite the high body count, the author allows for some ambiguity by resolving certain conflicts without bullets. This is very much a book about men, and the reader never gets to see the female characters, both Anglo and Blackfoot—Yellow Bird’s nation—as fully realized as the male characters. This, along with the violence, is a standard component of the traditional Western, but by moving beyond that to explore the men’s emotions and relationships, the author adapts the genre to the modern era.
A story of honor and revenge that unites modern sentiments and genre traditions.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1612186641
Page Count: 265
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
