Facts and skills galore in a mix of stories, the best quite fine.
From a prolific writer and producer of documentaries (including Nature) for PBS: a collection that’s varyingly deft and has many subjects—including nature and animals.
Whitty’s “science” stories are in fact the strongest here, including the title piece with its simultaneously tender and melancholy portrait of Tonga from its paradisiacal pre–Captain Cook era down to the abused and species-depleted place of today—though thankfully still not without its great tortoises, which are wondrously described by Whitty indeed. The soberly comic “Darwin in Heaven” is just as fine: a chronicle of Darwin’s ongoing research into the mystery of life once he’s in heaven—and of his consultations there with, among others, Lao-tzu and Richard P. Feynman. Much less prepossessing, though, is a tale told by zoo animals (“Lucifer’s Alligator”) that labors preciously under the weight of its message; while “Jimmy Under Water,” about Antarctic ocean-diving, defies credibility in spite of its knowledgeable details. Other stories, also, are filled chock-full with informational expertise yet seem programmatic—like “Daguerreotype,” a look at generations of child-bearing women in a family—or just don’t convince psychologically—like “Stealing from the Dead,” about a young woman painter who seduces a Byron biographer in Venice and then, quite inexplicably, turns on him. “Senti’s Last Elephant” offers a close-up of African safari land but suffers from its easy satire of complacent Americans, while “Falling Umbrella” tries hard—and almost succeeds—in wrenching genuine emotion from its portrayal of the old age and death of a widowed mathematician. “The Dreams of Dogs” closes the volume with the tale of a young widow who moves onto two thousand wilderness acres in the Pacific Northwest and lives out her life there in the company only of the few local Indians—and of her dogs, who, like the tortoises, are described with a tender, knowledgeable perfection.
Facts and skills galore in a mix of stories, the best quite fine.Pub Date: April 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-11980-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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