Bleak, stately, terrifying, and moving: It's not just the wonderful story and completely original, perfectly American...
A handsome young psychopath begins a spree of train robbery and murder in the West Texas border country, and the victimized railroad hires the legendary Ranger Captain Woodrow Call, aging hero of McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, to stop him.
Gabby, funny Gus McCrae is in his grave, but years later other veterans of McMurty's epic cattle drive live on. Woodrow Call is nearly an old man, still maintaining his reputation as the greatest manhunter in the West. Living nearby, Pea-Eye, Call's old corporal, is a farmer married to Lorena, the gracefully fading beauty who once worked as a prostitute. Pea-Eye and Lorena, the only teacher at the little local school, have five children. Captain Call's final manhunt begins with orders from Colonel Terry, president of the railroad whose trains have been knocked off and passengers murdered by coldblooded Joey Garza. Call summons Pea-Eye to ride with him as he has always done, but Pea-Eye, who almost desperately loves his farm and family and who is beginning to feel his age, refuses the Captain for the first time in his life, and Call has to begin his hunt with no help other than that of Mr. Brookshire—the Brooklyn accountant Col. Terry sent to mind his money. The manhunt is almost immediately complicated by the return of Mox Mox, a murderous pervert who likes to torture and burn his victims. Mox Mox is working the same territory as Joey Garza, a beat also patrolled by the gunslinger John Wesley Harding. It's really more than Call can handle, no matter how quickly the terrified Mr. Brookshire loses his city-bred helplessness. As Call slowly tracks Garza, Maria (Garza's mother) sets out to save her son; a guilt-ridden Pea-Eye finally rides off to join his old boss; and Lorena follows her husband. Everybody who survives winds up in Joey's hometown for the showdown.
Bleak, stately, terrifying, and moving: It's not just the wonderful story and completely original, perfectly American characters; McMurtry writes as well about aging as has ever been done.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-79281-4
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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