A generally well-written narrative covering the less-frequently chartered years during which Hemingway first displayed...
Mooers (J.P., 2013, etc.) returns to historical fiction, this time following 19-year-old Ernest Hemingway, who comes home from war and struggles to readjust to life in the civilian world.
Working from a plethora of sources, including some Hemingway anthologies, Mooers reconstructs day-to-day details of the two years between Hemingway’s return to Oak Park, Illinois, after having been seriously injured in World War I, and his departure for Paris, where he would eventually become part of the Left Bank expat crowd of artists and writers. Still in pain from the leg injury he suffered while working as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, he came home with many of the 277 shell fragments embedded in his leg and groin, still “working their way up to the surface.” He also experienced frequent flashback memories of the explosion that almost cost him his life. Today, we might say he had PTSD. On top of this, he received a breakup letter from Agnes von Kurowsky, the nurse who tended to him in Italy and then became his lover. Depressed and rudderless, young Hemingway decided to devote himself primarily to fishing the rivers and streams of Walloon Lake near Petoskey, Michigan, site of their family summer home, christened Windemere by his mother. Encircled by a coterie of devoted friends, among whom he was a star, he regained his confidence (some might say arrogance) and embraced his status as a local war hero and fledgling writer. An adept stylistic chameleon, Mooers often approximates the cadence made famous by his subject. By Mooers’ own admission, there are “parts where I use the actual words spoken, the actual words written, or the actual scene as it happened,” so the text—with help from its 26-title bibliography, sans citations—becomes a sort of treasure hunt for Hemingway devotees looking to uncover the verifiable quotations. For the rest of us, it’s simply a solid story that conveys the uncertainties and the contrasting hubris of a young man wracked by memories of the war while on the cusp of a phenomenal literary career.
A generally well-written narrative covering the less-frequently chartered years during which Hemingway first displayed flashes of the man he’d become.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988648685
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Riverrun
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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