Pretty funny. Even funnier if you’ve been this route.
A feckless Chicagoan traces the amusing episodes in his moderately working life (circa 1961–79) and the steps that led to his many, many unscheduled departures.
In 17 sequential stories, Manderino (The Man Who Once Played Catch with Nellie Fox, 1998, etc.) takes his nameless hero from delivery boy at a South Side meat market (where his dad’s a butcher) through stints as altar boy, ditch-digger, ballplayer, Art Institute security guard, Vista worker, Indian tutor in South Dakota, and umpire (not to mention eight other gigs) to his final destination as a writer. It’s a rough trip. Clearly not meant to do whatever it is he’s doing until he gets to writing—and what kind of an end is that?—the well-meaning lad never seems to catch on that well-meaning is never enough to see a body through the workday, much less the workweek, or that well-meaning is what gets you onto an Indian reservation, where you actually get named No-Name (shorthand for “something like Many Roads or Many Jobs”), make a mortal enemy in a baseball game, fail to connect with kids at the tutoring center who need someone many times more squared away than you, and finally leads you to a disastrous session in a sweat lodge. Not only does the guy have well-meaning problems, he’s got that other literary bedevilment: he’s nuts for baseball. Nuts enough to take the Greyhound to a tryout camp in Florida, where he doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance, and much later to try out as an umpire and get literally laughed out of the game. It would all be exhausting except that Manderino is a funny writer, and his hero never stays in one spot long enough to put the reader through really brutal humiliation or life-threatening introspection.
Pretty funny. Even funnier if you’ve been this route.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-89733-499-X
Page Count: 179
Publisher: Academy Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
