bookshelf

THE NEWSBOYS’ LODGING-HOUSE

Name: THE NEWSBOYS’ LODGING-HOUSE
Author: Jon Boorstin
ISBN: 0-670-03115-1

OR THE CONFESSIONS OF WILLIAM JAMES

by Jon Boorstin ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2003

Second-novelist (Pay or Play, 1997) and producer Boorstin (All the President’s Men) has a good feel for academe and the...

bookshelf

An engaging, if overly complex, historical thriller begins with William James’s 1908 nervous breakdown and follows the story of the Harvard philosopher recovering.

For the young James, who had abandoned his artistic ambitions to study medicine, “nervous breakdown” is probably a prolonged depression brought on by his unsuitable career. In any event, it leaves him hopeless, suicidal, and unable to function for months on end. Committed to an asylum by his father, James makes little progress until he discovers the books of Horatio Alger, whose tales of homeless boys triumphing over adversity fascinate him—enough that he runs away from the asylum to search for Alger in New York, where he finds the author working in a newsboys’ shelter. James joins him, helping to run the house and teach drawing to the boys. When a newsboy named Jemmie leaves the home and falls in with street toughs, James and Alger fail to persuade him to return. In attempting to help him, James meets the boy’s sister, Emma, and finds work for her as a housemaid in the Vanderbilt mansion. But when the Vanderbilt house is burgled and the butler murdered, Jemmie falls under suspicion and is arrested. James knows the boy is innocent, but his efforts to clear him are complicated by an unrelated but embarrassing discovery: Emma is pregnant, and James may be the father. The moral quandaries facing James bear little relation to the academic considerations that took up so many of his hours in the classroom, and he must learn to make his way through a world of shady lawyers, high-society abortionists, poetic gangsters, and a handful of decent souls who try to manage against the odds. It’s a long way from Harvard—and just the thing to put him back on his feet.

Second-novelist (Pay or Play, 1997) and producer Boorstin (All the President’s Men) has a good feel for academe and the underworld alike, and his old New York is pungent and real—but his tale becomes unnecessarily convoluted and unravels toward the end.

Pub Date: March 10, 2003

ISBN: 0-670-03115-1

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

bookshelf

Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

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.