Nelson's third novel (All Around Me Peaceful, 1989, etc.)—a rousing, realistic story about an ornithologist in midlife crisis who finds himself. Its sense of place is powerful, and its integration of personal matters with political intrigue skillful. Scott Talmadge returns to the Southwest when he's offered a temporary position as a professor of ornithology in Tucson. The first half of the book weaves together flashbacks with quotidian detail. Talmadge's marriage to Demer was a ``slow, downward spiral''—a tangled history that includes Tilghman Myre, an old college friend and possible rival, still in the vicinity, whose ``gaze was always on the next hurdle.'' Through occasional letters from Demer, who left Talmadge for South America to help political refugees, and through his renewed association with Myre, who is rescuing Guatemalan refugees seeking asylum, Talmadge works his way past personal indecision to get involved hip-deep in the asylum movement. The second half of the story includes Talmadge's eventual love interest, Francie, once involved with Myre; novelist Ellis Carmichael, who lives in Central America; and a series of adventures and misadventures, sometimes baggy but often snappy and tense, through which Talmadge learns to take risks both for himself and others. He reads Demer's journals—a clichÇd device, but one that serves here—and discovers that she's deeply involved in the movement and that he can let go. After Myre dies in the American desert during a rescue operation, Carmichael writes a book about ``a man for the eighties: principled but misguided, a rebel with a lost cause''; Francie gets pregnant; and life goes on: ``We lose track of people, even the people we once loved.'' Like Dan O'Brien and Tom McGuane, Nelson manages to convey grandly what people and places make of each other.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-87905-394-1
Page Count: 260
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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