bookshelf

THE PLEDGE

Name: THE PLEDGE
Author: Rob Kean
ISBN: 0-446-52497-2

by Rob Kean ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 1999

bookshelf

A less-than-rewarding debut thriller about rampant campus wickedness. Anson Templeton, dean of small but prestigious Simsbury College in Georgeville, Maine, is a rotter. He likes kinky sex, easy money, and bullying. Compare him with the brothers of Sigma Delta Phi, however, and he all but shines. Yet Sigma is Simsbury’s premier fraternity house, home to big-men-on-campus, star athletes, and even a smartie or two. Everyone, it appears, yearns to go Sigma. But no one—that is, no outsider—really knows what membership entails. What’s demanded of Sigmas is nothing short of Mafia-like fealty. Orders come down from fat-cat alumni, through an eager brotherhood, to robotic pledges, who understand (it’s been beaten into them) that the edicts are to be obeyed without reference to propriety, morality, or even legality. For stalwart Sigmas the prizes are glittering: big jobs post-graduation, big incomes, the time-honored Faustian compact. And these shabby shenanigans have been going on for 200 years—until the night the fun and games go too far, when the naked, badly mauled, hazed-to-death body of a Sigma pledge is found by a campus cop. Dean Templeton leaps immediately into action. The boy was depressed, he says. An obvious suicide. Tragic, certainly, but clearly Sigma is not at fault. He quickly convenes the student body’s compliant Discipline Squad to participate in the cover-up, expecting it to rubber-stamp a phony investigation. But Templeton is wrong about two of the students: Shawn Jakes, the golden girl with the cantankerous mind, and Mark Jessy, the charming ne’er-do-well who turns out to be the stuff of superheroes. By bringing to light a corrosive pattern of chicanery, conspiracy, brutality, and, yes, murder, Jakes and Jessy eventually bring down the horrid house of Sigma. Irritating when it’s not merely silly’sordid, outlandish, and dispiriting.

Pub Date: Aug. 25, 1999

ISBN: 0-446-52497-2

Page Count: 528

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

bookshelf

DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

bookshelf

Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).