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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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