Harmless fun for the lads, courtesy of second-timer McNally (Troublemakers, not reviewed).
A flamed-out dot-commer revisits his fairly grubby apprenticeship in delinquency in the tutelage of an older and street-wiser buddy.
The always reliable fascination of the good kid with the possibilities of the hood life knit together anecdotal memoirs set in the seedy southwest corner of Chicago in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Despite a home life that’s spiraling toward the septic tank, eighth-grader Hank Boyd has made it through Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy elementary with pretty good grades, staying out of the principal’s office and avoiding confrontation with the older kids who menace the sidewalk. He is certainly doing better than twice-flunked Ralph, the school hellion. Ralph, who lives with his never-seen mum in a shingle-sided shotgun exception to the buff brick postwar neighborhood flouts authority and has criminal connections, cousins Kenny and Norm. Loosely bonded by Hank’s qualified admiration and Ralph’s pleasure in having a semi-capable assistant, the boys begin to test the tolerance of the community for their brand of largely victimless small crime. Ralph is always proposing stuff that’s a lot scarier than any trouble they actually get into, and Hank has to scramble to talk Ralph out of his bad ideas. Kenny and Norm, who have done time and have cars, provide constant peeks at the possibilities of bigger and more dangerous activities, but the worst trouble they get the younger boys into is a gig wearing Sesame Street drag at a used-car lot. Much time is spent dwelling on Hank’s preadolescent and unrequited lust for the girls in his class and then for a sexy young teacher. And there is a very amusing reminiscence of CB radio in its glory days. In a longish coda, Hank, now a jobless CPA, returns to Chicago to lick his wounds after losing his girlfriend and again falls in with Ralph and the cousins, who now have a hugely successful business cleaning up crime scenes.
Harmless fun for the lads, courtesy of second-timer McNally (Troublemakers, not reviewed).Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5555-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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