Lighthearted vignettes from a senior’s point of view.
A collection of upbeat, quasi-fictional tales geared to seniors.
Retired aerospace engineer Epps composed most of the selections between the age of 68 and 88–his brush is broad, covering sports, ghosts, politics, religion, marital life, crime and the adventures, and misadventures, of youth. “An Unlikely Hero” concerns childhood friend Sam Perkins, who hit two grand-slam homers in a baseball game, earning a measure of fame and the undying interest of high school girls. “Amazing Visitors Come to Leisure Village” is about extraterrestrials and is dedicated to the author’s nephew, Dr. Steven Greer, who established the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence and spearheads the effort for government disclosure of UFOs. Some stories are fables, as in the case of “Reform School,” in which boys who take their lumps are justly rewarded and boys that avoid them get an appropriate comeuppance. In “An Old Shoe,” a senior teaches a young man valuable life lessons. Occasionally the author addresses a story to a particular audience. In “World Peace–At Last!” the author asks if Ted Turner, Bill Gates or Warren Buffet might be interested in his ideas for improving our world. “A Tunnel To….?” demonstrates the resourcefulness of seniors in a precarious situation, while other stories are what might be characterized as “gray” fantasies. Throughout, the tone is appealingly earnest, with the author moving easily between reality and fiction. A few stories are gems from the golden years, but not everything here glitters. At times, the point of a story is elusive and plots formulaic–as when Epps takes an event or well-known personality (e.g., the oft-married Thomas Manville) and works backwards to create a tale with a twist. Once the reader catches on, the gimmicky endings become tedious and more likely to produce smiles than guffaws. Still, seniors may enjoy reading about the younger generation getting their just desserts from the silver-haired set.
Lighthearted vignettes from a senior’s point of view.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4404-4203-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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