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
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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