A perfectly serviceable CSI-style forensic thriller, but its significance falls short of its title.
In his debut novel, Platt (Holy Economics, 2011) obliquely questions the Rev. Martin Luther King’s vision of equality with a story about an African-American baby’s death.
As the retired chief medical examiner of Summit County, Ohio, and a specialist in pediatric pathology, Platt is well-placed to spin a realistic medical case into a gripping courtroom drama. His novel, set in 2002, opens with two emergency medical technicians racing to a housing-project apartment to save a 6-week-old African-American boy named Elizer Marshall. The baby, who shows apparent signs of non-accidental, blunt head trauma, is dead by morning. Detectives decide they will need to take blood and urine samples from the boy’s parents—Will, an African-American man; and Eva, a Hispanic woman—to assess the likelihood of fetal alcohol syndrome and other abuse. The author’s comprehensive knowledge of anatomy, pathology and criminal law is evident in his detailed descriptions of a pediatric intensive care ward, a brain examination during autopsy, jury selection and cross-examination. For example, although most of the novel is told from a limited third-person perspective, Platt follows the jurors into seclusion to hear their deliberations. One key question finally emerges: Did the baby’s injuries result from forceful resuscitation, or are they proof of homicide? A clever twist ending will overturn readers’ ideas about who’s to blame for Elizer’s death. Parts of the book resemble a screenplay, particularly Chapter XXI, which is divided into “Scenes” labeled A through F. Indeed, the novel began life as a play, and this is reflected in its preference for dialogue over expository prose. However, despite the title, the book fails to contribute to the discourse about racial justice in America. Instead, it arbitrarily divides its characters into binary pairs, including one white and one black EMT (unsubtly named Tom Black), and one white and one black police detective. Also, although Will’s father presents abhorrent views—“Whitey is second class compared to us”—the book presents no voices of rebuttal. Will’s poetic cry for justice (“My God, My God. / Do Not Forsake Me. / For I Too Have a Dream / Like That of Martin Luther King, Jr.”) accounts for the title, but feels overblown.
A perfectly serviceable CSI-style forensic thriller, but its significance falls short of its title.Pub Date: March 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0979782510
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Monte Verde Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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