Mining the same material that he used for his first sea-tale (The Golden Ocean, 1956), O'Brian returned three years later to Commodore Anson's 1740 globe-circling voyage in The Unknown Shore, originally published in Britain in 1959. The book follows the adventures of another pair of friends, clearly the models for the Aubrey/Maturin 17volume series that was to begin, in 1970, with Master and Commander. In this precursor, midshipman Jack Byron and his lifelong friend, Tobias Barrow, join the Wager, a converted Indiaman merchant vessel, the fourth and least of Commodore Anson's squadron whose mission is to cross the Atlantic, sail down the coast of Brazil, round the Horn, and harass the Spanish treasure ships along the coast of Chile—this at a time when the Spanish had the Pacific practically to themselves. Jack is large, hearty, and physical—very much what Jack Aubrey might have been like in his youth. Toby, who ships as surgeon's mate, comes out of London's slums—a foundling who'd been apprenticed by a physician who, on a bet, said he believed anyone could be taught if caught early enough and kept at it long enough. Now, Toby, a true innocent, is overeducated and undersocialized, an enormously engaging Stephen Maturin-to-be; he's fluent in Latin and Greek, and natural science is his passion, but naval priorities, alas, remain a mystery to him. Wager, meanwhile, is manned by the dregs of Anson's squadron and captained by an inexperienced and brutal officer. Barely making it around Cape Horn, the ship is wrecked on an inhospitable coast, where the crew's natural proclivities lead to mutiny, desertion, drunkenness, and murder. Making their painful way north to the Chilean seaport of Valparaiso, only 5 of the original 220 will get back to civilization. O'Brian, with obvious affection for his characters and their time, hits his storytelling stride here. Nobody does the 18th-century British Navy any better.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03859-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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