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SWEETHEART

Name: SWEETHEART
Author: Peter McGehee
ISBN: 0-312-07863-3

by Peter McGehee ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1992

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Can life still be fun, even spontaneous, despite HIV and safe sex? Yes, indeed, according to Zero, whose adventures, sexual and political, now continue (after Boys Like Us). Zero, like most of his friends in this comic, gabby chronicle of these plague years, is HIV-positive. But he doesn't let a little detail like that slow him down. As the story begins, Zero, an American in Canada, is mourning his lover Randy, who got AIDS in book one. Zero and his fellow AIDS Action-Now activists have helped open a clinic that will administer pentamidine, which battles AIDS-related pneumonia. At the opening celebration, Zero is picked up by Jeff, which leads quickly to a graphic sex scene. As this relationship deepens into domesticity, a cutesy wrench is thrown into the works by the arrival of teenager Mary Bull—a would-be actress who was fathered by Zero's cousin and first lover, Trebeh, in a lesbian friend via turkey baster. But Mary Bull, like much else in this loosely linked string of episodes, many of them having to do with show biz, disappears and reappears without becoming fully engaged—or engaging. There is a visit home to the zany clan in Little Rock (repeat characters include gay Uncle Markus), where Zero's mom tells him she just wants him to get well. Back in Canada, when conflict arises over Randy's choice of an epitaph, which his parents call ``filth,'' Zero sums up, in a sense, the novel's raison d'àtre: ``He wanted something humorous and sexual to counter the usual impression people have of this disease. It's political, in a way.'' The challenge that McGehee poses, and admirably tries to meet, is how to treat the AIDS crisis with humor without registering as superficial and glib. At times, the flightiness of these blithe spirits seems forced—even grimly determined. But at least they're not wallowing in self-pity. And, finally, their courage, and commitment, impresses and moves.

Pub Date: June 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-312-07863-3

Page Count: 208

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992

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

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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.