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Preying Hands

Name: Preying Hands
Author: Richard Medugno
ISBN: 978-1499272895

A DRAMA INSPIRED BY ACTUAL EVENTS

by Richard Medugno Howie Seago ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 13, 2014

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A pedophile priest who targets deaf boys leaves a legacy of blighted lives and lost faith in this heavy-handed play.
Part I, set in the 1970s, introduces Father Larry O’Malley, principal of St. John’s School for the Deaf and the star of Milwaukee’s Catholic archdiocese thanks to the warmhearted charisma that makes both students and donors adore him. Unfortunately, O’Malley harnesses that charisma to sexually molest teenage boys in his charge while building a wall of complicit silence among the school’s staff. After a brief, veiled assault scene in 1960, time shifts to 1974, when James Grady and two friends, now in their 20s, discover they were all victimized by O’Malley; they vow to unmask him. When the police shrug off their accusations, and mealy-mouthed church hierarchs stonewall—“just heresy, excuse me, I mean hearsay,” blusters an archbishop—James and his friends go to the media with their accusations. Part II jumps ahead to the early 1990s, with alcoholic James unemployed and still full of rage over the long-ago molestation, his friends leading similarly haunted lives. Convinced that closure requires a final reckoning with O’Malley, James mounts a campaign to have the aging priest formally defrocked, an effort that bogs down in the church’s legalism and ingrained equivocation. Medugno, a playwright, and Seago, a deaf actor, are pointed in their condemnation of church policies on priestly abusers as well as in their discussion of problems of the deaf and hard-of-hearing. (Most of the dialogue is both spoken and signed, and the playwrights insist that deaf and hard-of-hearing actors play those specific roles.) As a result, there’s didacticism in the script, with characters sometimes speaking direct exposition to the audience or declaiming their anger—“Shame on you!”—to O’Malley’s imagined presence. Lacking Part I’s narrative structure of crime and revelation, Part II’s rumination on the psychological aftermath feels feckless and overwrought; as James bemoans the ruination of his life from a single brief assault, one starts to empathize with other characters who urge him to move on. The play’s high point is the revelation of the creepy deceptions—and self-deceptions—with which O’Malley weaves his religious strictures into his violation of children; it’s a compelling, and revolting, portrait of a warped moral sensibility.
A sometimes stilted, sometimes psychologically incisive dramatization of Catholic sex-abuse scandals.

Pub Date: May 13, 2014

ISBN: 978-1499272895

Page Count: 174

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: July 30, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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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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.