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Alcan Heavy Biker

Name: Alcan Heavy Biker
Author: Michael D. Sheimo
ISBN: 978-1499173512

by Michael D. Sheimo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2014

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Nonfiction author Sheimo’s (Stock Market Rules, 2012, etc.) first novel tracks a traveler’s motorcycle journey from Alaska to Minnesota on the treacherous Alcan Highway in the summer of 1970.
It doesn’t take much to convince Dan Johnson to embark on an adventure—just a couple of bucks. When his pal Jim loses a bet that he’d be the last to get married, Dan buys his first motorcycle and decides to go on a 3,000-mile journey to collect his $5 winnings and attend Jim’s wedding. Plus, he has a hunch his old flame Elaine might be there, which certainly sweetens the deal. Dan has only 10 days to travel from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Minneapolis on the Alcan Highway, a rugged and sometimes desolate route that could pose problems for an inexperienced motorcyclist. But Dan forges ahead, insisting, “[T]his might be my last chance to do something like this. At twenty-three years old, obligations will catch up to me.” The novel has an intriguing premise, and it may give motorcycle enthusiasts a nostalgia kick. However, the stiff, boilerplate dialogue quickly gives the odyssey a predictable, movie-of-the-week feel. Whether he’s battling angry bears, getting hassled by the border patrol or trying to save an out-of-control trucker, Dan always narrowly escapes injury, like James Bond or Indiana Jones. But unfortunately, Dan isn’t as interesting a character as those adventurers. Instead of requesting shaken martinis, Dan thinks about his preferred peanut-butter thickness on sandwiches (“one-half inch, a gourmet technique he learned a few years ago from his younger sister Anne”) and touts the benefits of “eyeball steaming”—that is, pressing his eye sockets against a hot coffee cup. Sheimo states in the acknowledgements that he actually traveled the Alcan Highway by motorcycle in 1970, but despite his firsthand knowledge of the terrain, the novel just doesn’t feel authentic enough to be completely believable. Instead, readers are left alone with the thinly sketched protagonist as he attempts to beat the odds, which seem always to be tipped in his favor.
A road trip that doesn’t feel dangerous or realistic enough to become a fully engaging adventure.

Pub Date: June 16, 2014

ISBN: 978-1499173512

Page Count: 198

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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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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.