by Nicholas Christopher ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2000
Honest and powerful, this kind of writing cuts through complacency like a knife.
Christopher, a writer based in New York, is the author of six previous collections of poetry, three novels, and a study of film noir. He also edited the anthologies Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry Since 1975 and Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets. In this book he writes 45 poems for each of two years, 1962 and 1972. In 1962 he was 11, `shooting tin cans off a barrel with a pellet gun` and sneaking surreptitious shots at swallows on telephone wires. This adolescent year is detailed in lines that are simultaneously spare and highly charged: “When you leave the room, / its sad heavy furniture, see-through curtains, threadbare carpet, / the television goes off.` Visual details are recorded without editorial comment, seemingly without emotion. Only occasionally does the poet allow himself even a simile: `The street cleaner, the milkman, the postman, / they’re all coming, one by one, in uniform, / like the stragglers at the end of a parade that passed long ago, / or the first scouts in an army that will never arrive.” Because the writing is so unadorned and plainspoken, its impact sneaks up. By 1972, at 21, the poet has experienced dropping acid, chain-smoking, and making love in bare rooms. There is a wanderjahre in Europe, chronicled with an equally objective eye. In Barcelona, before heading home to Manhattan, he reflects: `the bright blur / which occasionally occupies some corner of my sleep / or catches my eye from a speeding train / may be my own soul escaping me, / as it must, many times in this life, / each time slipping a little farther away.`
Honest and powerful, this kind of writing cuts through complacency like a knife.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-15-100553-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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BOOK REVIEW
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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