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SCANNING THE CENTURY

Name: SCANNING THE CENTURY
Author: Peter Forbes
ISBN: 0-14-058899-X

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IN POETRY

edited by Peter Forbes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2000

An entertaining anthology of value both artistically and historically.

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Editor Forbes divides his anthology into 39 sections, arranged both chronologically and by subject, with such headings as "Omens: 1900–1914," "Strange Fruit: Civil Rights 1930s–1968," and "Workout in Reality Gym: The Eighties & Nineties." In his introduction, Forbes notes that he does not (and could not) include writers from all parts of the globe—instead he focuses upon events that have been global in consequence (such as the world wars, advances in science and technology, and decolonization) and arranges his selections in connection to them. A timeline of events and their corresponding poems is included as an appendix. While over 100 translations appear, the majority of poets represented herein hail from Britain and the US. Forbes nonetheless has done an admirable job of being "inclusive" without pandering to the masses, and we are offered a generous sampling of contemporary British poets with whom most American readers are not likely to be familiar. While better-known poets such as W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice have the most entries (eight apiece), most others are allotted only one work (or excerpt), making it difficult to get a sense of the poets' work beyond what is given. Still, this is not meant to be an anthology of poets, but of poems, some of which have been included because they are topical, not because they are aesthetically important—but inferior poems are the exception here, not the rule.

An entertaining anthology of value both artistically and historically.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-14-058899-X

Page Count: 600

Publisher: Penguin UK/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

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by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.