by Robert Bausch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 30, 2016
Those unfamiliar with football will be heartened to learn that the game’s moves, strategy, and terminology are explained...
This sports-hero entertainment conjures up a woman who can play professional football in a book that isn’t overly serious about such social issues.
While vacationing on a Belize beach, Washington Redskins offensive coordinator Skip Granger spots Jesse Smoke throwing a football better than most NFL quarterbacks. She’s 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs about 180, with a lithe boyish build and freckles that Skip, the book’s semismitten narrator, will mention frequently, along with her blue eyes, curly hair, and sweet smile. Impressed but initially only mulling a practical joke at a Redskins tryout camp, Skip gets serious about signing Jesse as a quarterback after seeing her in a women’s pro game. Then Jesse also reveals that she can kick field goals with 100 percent accuracy from 50 yards. As she begins to set the team on course for the Super Bowl, the genre demands major obstacles, which here include: transgender rumors; the reappearance of a bad mom; weird nosebleeds; a missing birth certificate; and legal action by the players’ union, hoping to oust the lady and preserve the game’s integrity (no laughing, please). Bausch may be best known for the novel that became the movie Bruce Almighty. He’s also the twin brother of another fiction writer, Richard Bausch. In his eighth novel, Robert frames the narrative as a book written by Skip years after the events. This allows the coach to expose his weakness for sledgehammer foreshadowing at the end of some chapters, for instance: “And thus began the brief, heartbreaking career that became the legend of Jesse Smoke.” Bausch clearly is having fun—awkwardly so at times—with what is largely a teen genre aside from exceptions like Malamud’s brilliant The Natural. He even tosses in a Shroud of Turin reference (Jesse = Jesus?). There’s more football here than a nonfan might enjoy, but Jesse is impressive, the play-by-play is well-done, and the plot twists are less ham-handed than they seem at first.
Those unfamiliar with football will be heartened to learn that the game’s moves, strategy, and terminology are explained well enough that they'll be able to appreciate just how thoroughly la femme here kicks male derrière.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-397-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2006
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
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Pulitzer Prize Winner
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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