New Age jargon bobs along amiably on stream-of-consciousness froth in this quasi-nonfiction indulgence by the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (not reviewed). While paragliding, Bach meets a ``teaching angel'' named Shepherd (get it?), who reminds the pushing-60 writer of a promise he made 50 years ago to Dickie, his nine-year-old inner child: to ``write a book to take back, just for the boy you were, everything you know.'' That book presumably is this one, a cross between a Socratic dialogue and the transcript of a schizophrenic's rant. Richard's discussions with Dickie about free will, fate, risk, and coincidence consist mainly of other people's warmed-over tenets presented as revelations. (Dickie speaks for weary readers when he shouts, ``THAT'S TOO MANY, RICHARD!...IF YOU SAY ONE MORE MAXIM I'M GOING TO POP!'') Much of the book is devoted to perusing Richard's messy mental scrapbook: Childhood was a desert, but at least Dad taught him to play chess. Why did brother Bobby have to die? (Leukemia.) Why did Richard succumb to peer pressure and drink beer as an adolescent? First marriage goes sour; thank heavens Leslie- -the patient, mint teadrinking second wife to whom Richard recounts what he learns—remains deep, mysterious, and challenging. The treadmill of rhetoric keeps turning as Dickie goes grocery shopping with Richard, wakes him up at night, and accompanies him in flight. In the paraglider, they achieve the ultimate insight: There's lots in life over which we have no control; sometime we must trust what we cannot see. Not much originality here, but at least the clichÇs feel universal. Bach tills fertile New Age ground, emerging with such self-helpers' delights as crystals and ``soul on a sunbeam.'' Either you buy it or you don't. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-12716-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
