A welcome reintroduction to the pioneering African-American writer's most memorable fictional character. Already a popular poet, playwright, novelist, and key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes (1902-67) introduced Jesse B. Semple (``Simple'') to readers in 1942 in his Chicago Defender column, ``From Here to Yonder,'' as a way to convince black Americans to support the US war effort. From his familiar perch in a fictional Harlem bar, Simple held forth on a variety of subjects in his own inimitable, folksy way, and over the next 23 years his musings were collected in five volumes. The Return of Simple brings together mostly uncollected columns as well as a few favorites from previous collections. Simple's sometimes tall tales of growing up in the South and migrating to Harlem are timeless. Race riots, low wages, interracial marriages, adopting an African name, and birth control are some of the subjects on which he expounds to his erudite, educated fellow barfly, who always acts the straight man. Then there is Simple's favorite subject—``womens,'' including his wild cousin Minnie (``The Lord, I reckon, gave her them ball- bearing hips, but the Devil must of taught her how to use them''); Zarita, who is always ``drinking him up''; and his second wife, Joyce (``Eve in the garden could not be no better, because Eve had no stove on which to cook''). Simple speaks with a poetic and easy logic (``It is better to be wore out from living than to be worn out from worry'') in a voice that comes straight out of the African-American folk tradition, but Hughes's slices of urban black life belong also to the larger continuum of great American humor, from Mark Twain to Armistead Maupin. Quite simply, an indispensable part of our cultural heritage.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8090-8676-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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