A complicated yet convincing story of good and evil that keeps the preaching to a minimum, the suspense to the extreme.
In Keenan’s (The Origin and Applicability of Fighter Tactics, 1986) epic tale, a retired fighter pilot and football star, now an accomplished actor, returns to the town of his youth to seek answers and perhaps right wrongs of the past. But he’d better hurry: he only has one day to live.
Bishop Healey is having the worst day of his life. His balancing of faith and malevolence is challenged when boyhood friend Jack Cochran arrives and demands absolution years after killing his abusive father, a crime for which another man was punished. After meeting with Healey, Cochran undergoes life-threatening surgery and begins to tie up loose ends, finding enough rope to hang himself as well as a few others. As the secrets of numerous misplaced patrimonies are revealed and church abuses described, it soon becomes clear why others in search of justice or revenge also want an audience with his eminence. Healey knows where the bodies are buried and who put them there. In Keenan’s novel, the Catholic Church is taken to task on many accounts, but the flogging is never a penance for the reader. Moral temptations and mitigating arguments are as complicated as anything in John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions, and while this book stretches for the scope of Michener with flashbacks and back story, Keenan masterfully keeps the focus on men and women under stress. Readers see Cochran’s rough and tumble past and his career in Vietnam and how those events influenced him; unfortunately, we seeing nothing of his career as an award-winning actor, a garden that could have provided a rich harvest of iniquity. The narrative relies almost entirely on dialogue, which speeds exposition but does little to allow the world to be seen through the eyes of its characters.
A complicated yet convincing story of good and evil that keeps the preaching to a minimum, the suspense to the extreme.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5025-8664-3
Page Count: 410
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
