A rigorous, if bloated, tale about race and honor in World War II.
A journalist doggedly attempts to unravel a mystery about his father’s wartime service in this novel.
John Patrick “J.P.” Kilroy Jr. is a political columnist for the Washington Times who is estranged from his father, Johnny. When he’s called on to receive the Medal of Honor on Johnny’s behalf, Kilroy didn’t even know that he was dead. Reluctant to collect the award, Kilroy eventually relents. At the White House ceremony, he meets four men who served with his father in World War II: Schuyler Johnson, Harley Tidrick, Frank West, and Lincoln Abraham. Abraham is also getting a medal, one of seven African-Americans who served in World War II to be so decorated and the only living recipient. Kilroy is regaled by all four of his father’s old friends about Johnny’s service as an elite Army paratrooper. The columnist learns about Johnny’s best friend of the same name, called Jake to distinguish between the two. Kilroy soon becomes suspicious the crew is harboring a secret regarding his father, an impression all of the men eventually confirm. Nevertheless, they made a pact to never disclose the truth, compelling Kilroy to pursue the matter. Meanwhile, he begins a torrid romance with Cynthia Powers, a representative from the Army’s Public Affairs Office. Nevola (Revenge of the Pearl Harbor Survivors, 2011) spent four years researching this novel, and his scrupulously punctilious efforts show—his mastery of the historical material is astounding. The author is particularly adept at explaining the complex race relations that characterized the military at the time, wrought with prejudice and segregation. In a memorable exchange with Kilroy, Abraham complains bitterly that some German prisoners of war were treated with more respect than African-American soldiers. But Nevola buries readers under a mountain of minutiae and overdeveloped subplots, which is why the book needlessly registers at more than 500 pages. In addition, its tone can be cantankerously didactic: Schuyler grouses too hyperbolically about the decline of America. Still, the story’s denouement is spectacularly creative, justifying the author’s dawdle getting there.
A rigorous, if bloated, tale about race and honor in World War II.Pub Date: July 29, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4327-5665-9
Page Count: 530
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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