An immigrant story with universal appeal.
A young boy witnesses family dysfunction and tragedy in the wake of his seaman uncle’s arrival in New York.
After 50 years, Jack, a ship’s carpenter in the British Merchant Service, is on his last ship before his retirement, and New York, where his brother and his family live, is his final port of call. “The sea has been good to me, blewdy good,” he mutters. “So it’s on now to the next chapter of my life—a crusty ol’ Liverpool pensioner, fillin’ ’is days with pipe, paper, and the occasional pint at Baltic Fleet Pub.” Bird (A Rough Road, 2011, etc.) ominously sets the stage for dire things to come with a gut-punch sentence: “But Jack will never return to England.” The author’s debut memoir chronicled his bout with polio in 1940 at the age of 4. This next chapter in the family saga is set in 1956, the year when the raucous records of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and other fledgling rockers began turning up on jukeboxes in the pubs frequented (to excess) by 7-year-old Johnny’s father, Bill. This compact book is of a piece, but it is defined by two incidents. The first concerns a family party in honor of Jack’s visit. Bird deftly sketches the close-knit family and friends, including Margaret, the homely sister of Johnny’s mother, Nan, with a predilection for watching TV wrestling; Martin Moran, a recent émigré, who comes from “beyond the far”; and Bill, whose drunken antics on this night will expose the resentments of his wife of 25 years and who administers a shattering payback. The second incident, about which the less said the better, concerns Bill and Johnny’s Easter Sunday visit to Jack’s ship and the aftermath that cements family ties. Bird exhibits a keen ear for English and Irish dialects and the folk tunes that bind the Astoria, Queens, neighbors, as well as a respect for ritual. At the party for Jack, “Nan softly sings ‘Mother Machree’ and Margaret follows with ‘Home to Mayo,’ each delivered with sweet longing.” The slippery rules of memoir allow for conversations to which the author could not possibly have been privy, but they read as emotionally true.
An immigrant story with universal appeal.Pub Date: June 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-63450-9
Page Count: 134
Publisher: The Big Apple-Hellgate Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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