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SEVEN FACES

Retro kitsch and sundry delights pepper this sequel to 1995's hardcover reprint of Murder Me!, first published in 1936 in Detective Fiction Weekly. Brand, favored pseudonym of Frederick Schiller Faust (18921944), king of the pulps, prolific screenwriter (80 movies are based on his works or scripts), author of four books of serious poetry, founder of the Dr. Kildare series, the Destry novels, etc., etc., wrote 30 million words, the equal of 530 ordinary books, before dying as a war correspondent in Germany. Currently the pop prodigy has nine (count 'em) publishers issuing, among them, a new book by Brand every four months in just about all of the genres that anyone could think of (crime, fantasy, historical romance, espionage, westerns, science fiction, adventure, animal stories, big business, big medicine. . . ). Even so, Brand remains more interesting for the figure he cut than for the works he hacked, although nearly everything he penned has great pace, and even his potboilers—which at times truly grip—are often based on classic themes and figures (Oedipus, Achilles, Faust, etc.). In this particular 61-year-old serial, though, the classic theme is not all that visible. Returning here are salt-and-pepper detectives Angus Campbell—a Scottish American idealist given to dour rejoinders—and blimpishly bouncy, chortlingly ebullient, fact-counting, cigar-chewing Patrick O'Rourke. Manhattan millionaire John Cobb has been receiving threatening letters, and so leaves for Chicago, hoping that by hopping the night-train he'll escape from his anonymous ill-wisher. Assigned as guards, Campbell and O'Rourke go along. When, after signing his $15 million will over to his cousin, Cobb disappears from his Pullman, Campbell and O'Rourke must check the train for their missing charge. He's not on the train, though, and not in Buffalo, so they scour Chicago- -and, as it happens, mean old Cobb has enemies galore from some slick deals he's pulled. More bouncy and bounding than Amtrak.

Pub Date: March 10, 1998

ISBN: 0-8032-1281-X

Page Count: 180

Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

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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