Joshua Rabb, a transplanted Brooklynite lawyer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1940s, is the only person who can understand the Yiddish ramblings of the survivor of an execution on one of the Papago reservations outside Tucson. That's how Rabb (Versions of the Truth, 1994, etc.) ends up in the crossfire between Meyer Lansky, the New York mobster who keeps trying to raise the money to keep cash-strapped Vegas visionary Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo Hotel alive, and Frank Costello, top capo of the New York Commission (represented locally by Joe Bonanno), who wants to bankrupt Siegel so he can muscle in on a bigger slice of the Flamingo pie. Lansky keeps sending mules to set up a Mexican heroin deal on Siegel's behalf; somebody (Costello? Bonanno? some ambitious lieutenant?) keeps killing them. It's all too complicated for a simple family man like Rabb, who wants nothing more than to go on supplementing his meager BIA income by building his private practice (latest indigent client: a Papago high-school kid accused of kidnapping, raping, and murdering a girl who wouldn't go out with him; his defense is that the killer was the girl's father, who'd been abusing her for years) and making a home for his teenage daughter, Hanna (latest romantic interests: Lansky's son Buddy and Bonanno's son Bobby). Tangling with real-life 1947 gangsters gives dogged Rabb's crusades a new edge and resonance—but also a license for the wholesale violence and overwrought heroics Parrish presents so often and so unconvincingly. Save this one for your beach bag.
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93852-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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