Fast-flying, if sometimes-simplistic, pieces that celebrate patient observation and the beauty of birds.
Short pieces capture a Chicago-area bird watcher’s thoughts as he looks for glimpses of life on the wing.
The one-page reflections here first appeared in the online magazine Two-Fisted Birdwatcher in its “Daily Sightings” category. The magazine was founded by Lubow (Paper and Ink: Stories, 2015), a former creative director at one advertising agency and founder of another. He’s not an ornithologist, however—he’s a “regular guy” jotting down his sightings as he looks at birds or takes short wilderness walks. He’s knowledgeable about birds’ names, habits, colors, and so on, but wears it lightly, saying, for example, of the many varieties of warbler, “screw their picky little names.” Many pieces speak of Lubow’s longing for the wilderness that underlies his big-city life. He grabs moments on weekends, while on his way from a presentation, or while driving home from work. Yet, he says, “When you leave the woods, all settled and free of words, what craziness makes you go to the keyboard and type these?” Many readers will find the tension of this contradiction to be relatable. Lubow’s advertising background gives him a good instinct for pared-down prose and punchy lines that approach the directness of poetry, as in “Place names”: “I’m not in the business of naming things. Still, that doesn’t stop me from remembering them. And, in a way, that’s the same thing.” That said, the pieces’ stripped-down style (and especially their endings) sometimes feel forced, rushed, or oversimplified. Wondering why bee populations are down and cormorants are plentiful, Lubow just shrugs: “What’s going on? That’s up to science to figure out, if it can,” concluding that “change happens—get used to it.” Another essay observes a drastic decline in eastern meadowlarks, ending with the question, “was that meadowlark the last one you’re going to see around here?” That would be a shame, and much more than a personal one, but it’s something that Lubow doesn’t really confront. Nevertheless, he succeeds in conveying his love for avians and the excitement of spotting them in the wild.
Fast-flying, if sometimes-simplistic, pieces that celebrate patient observation and the beauty of birds.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4996-2446-5
Page Count: 166
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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