Painters' lives of quiet desperation, rickety Rocky Mountain relationships, and the unending difficulties faced by black men in white America make up the bulk of these nine stories (three previously published), as Everett (see below; God's Country, 1994, etc.) returns to familiar themes with his usual subtlety and eccentric comic flourishes. The painter in ``Cerulean'' breaks down when an encounter with an indigent makes him feel like a schmuck: as a result, he gives in to a long-suppressed urge to eat paint, which awakens his wife's latent hostility; the Denver painter in ``Dicotyles Tajacu'' has already lost his wife to a dermatologist, so he burns his latest work and hits the road for Laramie, along the way connecting with a stuffed wild pig missing an eye; the Colorado painter in the title story breaks into his D.C. gallery to rescue a major work just sold to someone he despises—and distrusts his new wife when she says she understands. The black bullrider in ``Turned Out'' has the strangest experience of a lifetime on a killer bull, while the black cowhand in ``Squeeze'' has too close an encounter with his one-legged friend's dentures, thanks to a racist prankster. Meanwhile, a rancher catches his wife cheating on him, then learns he's dying of stomach cancer (``Throwing Earth''). In ``Wolf at the Door,'' another rancher with trouble in his marriage and a love of wild animals struggles to find a way to reconcile himself to his life. The thematic and situational similarity in these modern tales of western woe provides continuity and some strength, but ultimately the reiteration keeps any one story from emerging from the pack. Vignettes nicely crafted, and eminently readable, but none worthy of superlatives.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55597-238-1
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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