by Margaret George ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2006
An Olympian effort, worthy of shelving alongside Renault and Graves.
A spirited appendix to one of literature’s greatest stories, in which the face that launched a thousand ships is supplied with a brain and a voice to match her legendary beauty.
Greek tragedy warns that you should always be careful what you wish for. George (The Memoirs of Cleopatra, 1997, etc.) honors that convention here, imagining that at least part of the misery wrought by and upon Agamemnon and Menelaus owes to their juvenile longing for a new age of heroes. It’s no help to their egos when Clytemnestra chimes in, “you will have to content yourself with cattle raids and minor skirmishes. That is the problem with times of peace. But who would wish it otherwise?” They would, and their time comes when Menelaus’ discontented wife gets her wish and heads for Troy with a prince of the city, Paris. While appreciative of his demi-divine prize, Paris recognizes that the affair isn’t such a good idea. Brilliant as well as beautiful, Helen is persuasive, though Paris convinces her to at least leave her daughter behind, saying that because she loves Sparta, she “will not leave it bereft of a queen.” All that comes back into play years later, after Achilles has spent his wrath and Hector tamed his horses, after Iphigenia has been sacrificed and Troy is a heap of smoking stones. The best part of the tale lies in the shadows of which the Homeric epics hint but do not speak. The author does a fine job, for instance, of depicting the continuing fury of the curse of the Atreids, which finally resolves itself in a new era that has no room for heroes, and of imagining a sort-of-reconciled Helen and Menelaus growing old together, a “shuffling, old-person’s peace—the peace that descends when all other concerns have either died or fled.”
An Olympian effort, worthy of shelving alongside Renault and Graves.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03778-8
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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BOOK REVIEW
by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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by Harper Lee
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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