Big trouble in Talon Town, the name given by the archaeologically correct Gears (People of the Lightning, 1995, etc.) to a political and cultural center of the 12th-century Anasazi people in what is now New Mexico. Here, the dire careers of two ruthless rulers spawn murders and betrayals while mystery burgeons and romance flutters. This pounding-moccasin's saga is similar to the Gears' other books, in which the nobly inclined and spiritually attuned escape from evil heavies in high places. In this latest, Crow Beard, the absolute ruler of the Straight People (the Anasazi), is dying. Many years before, he had ordered the murder of a young woman of the Mogollon people, taken in a raid and enslaved. The court's holy man, the ``Sunwatcher'' Sternlight, is forced to do the deed. What Crow Beard doesn't know is that Sternlight allowed the girl's baby to live, with (eventually) important ramifications for all. The baby had been given to a couple of ``Made People'' (as opposed to the elite ``First People''), who raised her with their son. A horrible death awaits the boy and his father, while the girl, Cornsilk, now 14, flees for her life. She will eventually team up with Poor Singer, who's being whomped into spiritual shape as a disciple of a powerful shaman. Finally, all principals will cluster in Talon Town, where Crow Beard's nasty son Snake Head is plotting the death of his mother Night Sun, whom he suspects of bearing a child by the Warrior Chief Ironwood (he's on target there) and planning a secret alliance with the chief of the Mogolons, whose daughter was Sternlight's victim. Again, the Gears' people are anything but silent as they mull over their multiplying predicaments with expository earnestness. Still, the grue-soaked action, mystic journeying, and sentiment churn on efficiently against some rather nice scenery. More of the same, but with respectable anthropological underpinnings. (Author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-85853-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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