by Rebecca Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1994
Brown (The Children's Crusade, not reviewed) relates this slow, doleful tale of a home-care volunteer for people with AIDS in an unsentimental voice that treats illness and dying with a sort of reverence—but which also fails to generate much interest. The unnamed narrator in an unnamed city is a long-time volunteer for Urban Community Services, a program founded to provide care for people with AIDS (PWAs). As the number of PWAs grew and new medicine allowed them to live longer, the need for home-care workers, respite workers, buddies, a food bank, and home meals expanded, so that UCS is now a significant community presence with government funding. The narrator manages to slip in this textbook information while describing the time she spends each week with various clients: Connie, an old woman who was infected with HIV during a blood transfusion while undergoing a mastectomy; Rick, a young gardener who's going downhill fast; Ed, an angry soap-opera addict who doesn't want to enter the hospice because no one ever leaves there alive; Carlos, who is sometimes incontinent and trying to deal with the embarrassment of his new condom catheter; Marty, an old friend of Carlos's, who reveals that he helped Carlos kill himself because he was in so much pain at the end; Keith, a man virtually covered with quarter-sized purple sores that the narrator, for the first time since starting her work, has a hard time dealing with (he ``really looked like the plague''). In the end, the narrator realizes that her difficulty with Keith was a sign of burn-out and accepts the drain that comes with watching people die. So when Margaret, a friend and the head of home-care services at UCS, tests positive, quitting this kind of work is the only way the narrator can recapture hope for a cure. Guilt-inducing for those who expect good writing and find themselves yawning over people's deathbeds. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017159-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
Share your opinion of this book
More by Rebecca Brown
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
33
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
National Book Award Finalist
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Share your opinion of this book
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
Share your opinion of this book
More by J.D. Salinger
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.