A true Hamill piece: by turns fascinating, sentimental, hackneyed, and provincial in the best New York mode. It won’t play...
Journalist and author Hamill (the novel Loving Women, 1989; Why Sinatra Matters, 1998, etc.) offers a chronicle of 250 years of Manhattan life as experienced by an immortal Irish immigrant.
Growing up in the Ulster countryside in the 18th century, Robert Carson was constantly regaled with tales of the chieftains and warriors who’d fought over Erin across the centuries. As a Protestant, Robert was inclined to have more sympathy than most Irishmen with the English and Scots—until his mother was killed by the English Earl of Warren and Robert’s father revealed to him that his true name was Cormac O’Connor. The O’Connors have secretly preserved the Irish language and the ancient (pre-Christian) religion, and Cormac is now inducted into the family mysteries. Vowing revenge for his mother’s death, he sets off in pursuit of Warren but finds that he’s left for America. So Cormac boards ship and lands in Manhattan in 1741. Soon, he gets work in a printing shop run by a German immigrant named John Peter Zenger, eventually becoming a kind of journalist who roams the city’s back alleys and reports the gossip and events of the day. In the aftermath of a slave revolt, Cormac saves the life of an African magician and is granted the power of immortality—provided he never sets foot off Manhattan Island. Not a bad deal, since it allows the ever-observant Cormac to be eyewitness to some of history’s greatest spectacles—from the American Revolution to the Draft Riots, from the rise and fall of Tammany Hall to the stock market crash. Oh, and that business of September 11, 2001, too. Like all real New Yorkers, Cormac doesn’t mind being trapped in Manhattan: He’s doesn’t even know there’s anywhere else.
A true Hamill piece: by turns fascinating, sentimental, hackneyed, and provincial in the best New York mode. It won’t play in Poughkeepsie, but there are plenty of New Yorkers (and New York-ophiles) who will love it.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-34111-8
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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