Excellent work by a self-described “overnight success” who’s spent the past 40 years trying to get a novel published.
The adventures of a young lieutenant in the post–Civil War army are balanced with his sweet private life—in a debut from a Kansas-based professor near retirement age.
Lt. Michael Crofton’s young career takes him from Little Big Horn to the Zulu wars in South Africa via London and revolutionary Cuba, bringing onstage the likes of Rutherford Hayes and William Tecumseh Sherman, but there is neither grandiosity nor bombast. Coplin’s tone is so artfully unassuming and his hero, a West Point graduate from a prosperous Rhode Island family, is so genuinely modest that time flies dreamily in a tale that ends long before Crofton has worn out his welcome. And it all seems possible. As Coplin reminds us, the army in the 1870s had shrunk to 25,000, and Washington was still a small city, so the operators of the national machinery were just down the street. The very likable young Lt. Crofton’s story begins with his fortunate escape from the carnage at the detested General Custer’s last stand followed by his failure to dodge a bullet from the derringer in the hand of the breathtakingly pretty and young whore he will marry upon recovery. Leaving the skillfully sketched frontier, Crofton puts in purgatorial time sorting through army supplies with politically wired Lt. Sorenson. Sorenson’s congressional connections put the young men into the thick of an unsanctioned, possibly presidential plot to meddle in the outcome of Cuban revolutionary activities—a plot that ends as inconclusively as all Cuban plots tend to. More purgatory follows, this time in the national cemetery, and then it’s off to England through the worst of winter on a clipper ship, followed by a stint with the King’s Guards and a suicidal stand against the Zulus. As the adventures pile up, Crofton pines for his sweet young family. None of this is new, really, but it is all so fresh as narrated by the superbly modest soldier that it seems like—well—life.
Excellent work by a self-described “overnight success” who’s spent the past 40 years trying to get a novel published.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-399-15112-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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