Mama, Did They Drop The Bomb?

Name: Mama, Did They Drop The Bomb?
Author: Redway Havens
ISBN: 978-0988676213

by Redway Havens ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 8, 2013

A coming-of-age memoir that tries too hard to be a serious anti-war tome, though it’s an interesting look at liberalism in...

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The author recounts his transformation from boy to man, set against the backdrop of the Iraq War.

Havens’ debut memoir begins a couple of seasons after September 11, 2001, “as spring peeked up from the frozen ground,” but we first meet him on the day his grandmother dies. Feeling changed and vulnerable, he decides to transfer colleges and move in with a new group of friends. He’s your typical college kid—mostly interested in partying with friends—but that changes when America decides to invade Iraq in 2003. Havens feels frustrated with the blind faith his fellow Texans (and many Americans) have in President Bush, and he begins staging protests on his college campus. His extracurricular activity lands him in some trouble—he has several dust-ups with law enforcement, gets jeered by people in town, and a rift forms between him and his mother—but he keeps fighting to stop the war. Havens finds peace from his struggles in unlikely places: “More than anything else, the strip clubs were the one place where the war did not exist, the one place where I did not feel the need to rail against the injustice of everything,” he writes. This pastime, however, may seem to contradict his message of morality and equality. Havens reminds us that while the war may technically be over, its effects remain, as is the case with any military conflict; he cites sobering statistics of soldier suicides (“More U.S. soldiers died by suicide here at home in 2012 than died fighting the war in Afghanistan”) to prove his point. Havens’ mission in writing his story is admirable, but the execution sometimes falls short. While the writing is sincere—“The money, weed, people, and music…All of this only kept alive my desire to see the people of the world stop killing, raping, and hating each other”—it’s often somewhat artless. The prose also has the exceptional earnestness of a college student just discovering his interest in politics and social justice, which may inspire or annoy. Either way, Havens’ commitment to ending the war and his enthusiasm for peace is refreshing and comes across in his work.

A coming-of-age memoir that tries too hard to be a serious anti-war tome, though it’s an interesting look at liberalism in Texas.

Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2013

ISBN: 978-0988676213

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Redway Media

Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.