With varying results, two young men seek their fortunes in California after America's successful war against Mexico—in another solid historical from the prolific Wheeler (Cashbox, l994, etc.). When, in the spring of 1849, Ulysses McQueen (not yet 21) leaves his Iowa farm and pregnant wife Susannah to hunt for gold in faraway California, he endures a series of soul-testing hardships on the unsparing overland route to El Dorado. Robbed of his mules and gear by marauding Indians, menaced by brigands and disease, he still presses on. Meantime, Stephen Jarvis, an ex-Army officer, decides to try his luck on the West Coast. Hired as casual labor by Johann August Sutter, he's on site when gold is discovered near a sawmill being built by the Swiss ÇmigrÇ. Stephen soon strikes it rich and uses his new wealth to start retailing scarce tools and other goods to eager prospectors, yearning all the while for Rita Concepcion Estrada, a like-minded but well-born Mexican girl whose proud Catholic family wants no part of a Protestant Yanqui. As Stephen is making a name for himself among the merchant princes of Sacramento and San Francisco, Ulysses finally reaches California. Failing to hit pay dirt, he makes a deal for land in the San Joaquin Valley with Stephen, who's interested in developing local sources of fresh vegetables. Unbeknownst to Ulysses, Susannah has arrived in California by way of Panama (a journey that cost their infant daughter her life). The two finally find each other in 1851 and resolve to make a fresh start by returning to their agricultural roots. And at the 11th hour, Stephen's Latin ladylove kicks over the traces and that new pair sail off to make a new life for themselves in South America. Absorbing and eventful, replete with authoritative details on the mortal risks, primitive conditions, and sometimes rich rewards awaiting those who joined the gold rush to California.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-86185-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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