A rich subject barely mined for its artistic potential.
A literary portrait of the Daughter of the original Confederacy, Jefferson Davis’s youngest.
Conceived after the Confederate Army’s victory at the Battle of Chickamauga, Winnie was two years old when the Civil War ended, and her father, president of the Confederate States of America, was incarcerated as a traitor. From an early age, Winnie worked to remind the world of the true nature of her literate, heroic father, whom she called Jeff. She shared his intellectual curiosity, and when she returned to the States after completing her education in Germany, she wrote, studied and traveled with him. As Jeff aged and tired, Winnie appeared on his behalf at “Lost Cause” rallies across the South, where unrepentant Confederate veterans dubbed her the Daughter of the Confederacy. Before Jeff died, Winnie fell in love with Alfred Wilkinson, a Boston lawyer and grandson of the abolitionist Samuel May. Although her father approved of the match, public opinion was harsh. How could the “purest lily of the South” marry a Northerner? On this, as at every crossroad of public vs. private, Winnie ceded to her father’s legacy. Told in alternating first-person journal entries by Winnie, her older sister, Wilkinson and others, this well-researched novel offers much detail of the era and profiles of historic personages that included Joseph Pulitzer, who befriended the genteelly impoverished family after the war. Beauvoir, the rundown plantation home a widow deeded Jeff in gratitude for his service to the South, is notably described, as are Winnie’s efforts to support herself and her mother by working as a journalist, novelist and public speaker. It is in the conversion of fact to the aesthetics of the novel that the author stumbles. Oliver (Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky, 1994, etc.) fails to distinguish one character’s voice from another. And the inclusion of much historically interesting material irrelevant to the story undermines the storyline.
A rich subject barely mined for its artistic potential.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8203-2874-X
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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 is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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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