A big book about big earthquakes that ought to be scarier than it is, by the author of The Kindling Effect (1996). The New Madrid Seismic Zone isn’t something most people worry about when they worry about earthquakes. After all, it’s nowhere near the dreaded San Andreas Fault—or, for that matter, even in California. Deceptively quiet, it lurks instead in middle America, stretching for 140 miles over parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and other heartland states. But the fact is, three of the most potent eruptions on record in North America have taken place there. True, that was back in1811—12; not a great deal has happened to menace anyone since. And then, suddenly, the wait is over: a monster quake comes crashing through the Richter scale to flatten most of the Midwest. Bad as that is, the real concern is the next one, “the Big One,” expected to provoke “the gravest crisis the country has faced since the Civil War,” as an advisor informs President Nathan Ross. Even as it is, the cities are burning, and panicky citizens are looting, scavenging, and gunning one another down (ironically) in an all-out effort to survive. Then a corps of embattled seismologists, desperate to find a way of thwarting Mother Nature, arrives at an answer almost as horrific as the problem: a mini-nuclear explosion to serve as a deterrent. There’s disagreement, conflict—the righteous seismologists battle their selfish, career-driven peers, while the fate of the nation hangs in the balance. Meantime, despite riot, rampage, and havoc, hunky seismologist John Atkins still manages to connect with luscious seismologist Elizabeth Holleran, and the earth moves for all of the usual good, old reasons. Research receives the bulk of Hernon’s attention, while characterization gets but a lick and a promise. Which means the science convinces and the scientists don’t. Which means 8.4 rates a middling 4.8. (First printing of 75,000, $75,000 ad/promo, miniseries to NBC/Avent)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-14400-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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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