The protagonist is a weakness, but buffs will find compensations here. More than 80,000 books have been written about the...
A sickly, sensitive, Shakespeare-spouting 17-year-old becomes a Confederate Army killing machine.
The trouble is that Charlie Merrill spends much of his time stretching credulity. As he assesses the illustrious General Joe Johnston, he hardly seems his age: “He has restored hope,” Charlie tells his own commanding general, adding that that’s “[no] small thing for a man young or old.” This at 17? And a private talking to a general? Which army? What planet? Clearly, General Patrick Cleburne, hero of the Tennessee campaign, has taken a shine to youthful Charlie: he plays chess with him, swaps philosophies and literary quotations with him, sends senior officers to fetch him to his tent whenever the press of military affairs permits, and presents him with the last of his precious Whitworths: that marvelous rifle issued only to super-snipers. The process of Charlie’s achieving sharpshooter stardom could have been interesting, but it gets short shrift, offered as just one of those ironic contradictions: Charlie’s “a bookish boy who also loved guns.” At 15, he was almost carried off by a lingering illness, recovered, fell in love with a beautiful Bostonian, lost her, then left for the war a year or so later, where he slays with biblical ferocity in behalf of a cause he’s lost faith in. Flash forward to 1914, and there’s Charlie, venerable now, a respected writer and retired newspaperman, preparing to give a speech on the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Atlanta but in a funk because he doesn’t quite know what to say about it. Never mind, Charlie being Charlie, he delivers, and the crowd erupts accordingly: cheers, screams, tears even—bull’s-eye!
The protagonist is a weakness, but buffs will find compensations here. More than 80,000 books have been written about the American Civil War—and, with authoritative, vividly rendered battle scenes, Williams (Blue Crystal, 1993, etc.) earns a place somewhere, well, at least in the upper quadrant.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-33252-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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