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THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS FROM THE STONE

Name: THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS FROM THE STONE
Author: Mark Cox
ISBN: 0-8229-4065-5

by Mark Cox ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 1998

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paper 0-8229-5669-1 Cox, who teaches creative writing at both Oklahoma State and Vermont College, shares many qualities with other regular-guy poets: He’s manly but sensitive, capable of celebrating the orgasm in one poem (—The Blindness Desired—), while displaying his concern for abused women and children elsewhere (—Style—). For all his heavy-handed ironies about adulthood, he’s a sucker for little kids (—those mini-versions of ourselves—), who seem to say the darnedest things: His five-year-old stepson asks him to —make the cobra talk,— in a poem with that name; and in —Even the Broken Bird Sings,— a little girl with braces wonders if he can —hear the stringed instrument/we live inside of?— —Little Heaven— represents Cox at his sentimental worst, with memories of ice-cream trucks and sandlot baseball, and he mourns his first failed marriage, represented by his ex’s forgotten necklace. Cox stretches to find significance in everyday things and in —the ephemeral, the tenuous, the inherently unstable,— but his Zen aesthetic also lingers on memory, that —long extension cord stretched into the dark.— —Again— reflects on some heirloom jewelry, and —Pulsar— on a widower’s rummage for the Salvation Army, but Cox complains directly to Death (—Talking Death to Death—) for reducing us to such things, including —measly poems.— Cox’s second volume (after Smoulder), with his short, undistinguished lines and talky cadences, seldom reaches the —higher consciousness— he claims to seek.

Pub Date: June 4, 1998

ISBN: 0-8229-4065-5

Page Count: 108

Publisher: Univ. of Pittsburgh

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

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GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.