This hefty volume brings together three collections of newspaper columns by the pseudonymous Marchbanks. Written in the late 40's, during Davies' years as an editor and publisher, these musings, Perishes, obiter dicta, apophthegms, diary entries, and letters are only now available outside Davies' native Canada. To be more precise, these papers comprise The Diary, The Table Talk, and a Garland of Miscellanea by the aforementioned Marchbanks, but are "enlarged (to include a Biographical Introduction and Copious Notes calculated to remove all Difficulties caused by the passing of Time and to offer the Wisdom, not to speak of the Whimsicality, of this astonishing man to the Modern Public, in the most convenient form) by his long-suffering friend" and alter-ego Davies. To meet Marchbanks through these pages is to meet a curmudgeon of the highest order—a true misanthrope, an individualist of the most retrograde kind. Marchbanks, "a man whose temperament is philosophical and whose habits are sedentary," brings new meaning to the word "cantankerous." His enthusiasms, though few, help ease the dull routine of life's absurdities, and include cats, sherry, and Gypsy Rose Lee. More often, he confronts "an endless procession of vexing domestic problems," from his ongoing battle with an infernal furnace to his struggle against Nature in his pitiful garden. He rants and rafts against censors, the State, taxes, Hollywood, the masses, banks, machines, and the "disease of bad manners." In all things, he is by nature contrary." Everyman his own Boswell," Davies proves through his doppel-ganger, and he also provides fair warning: "only a coarse and warty soul could Find food for laughter here." While that invites his many fans, others will find this volume sometimes amusing, but mostly ephemeral.
Pub Date: July 1, 1986
ISBN: 0140097716
Page Count: 564
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1986
A laugh-out-loud funny book that will delight longtime Kinsella fans and those looking for a cozy holiday story.
Kinsella’s (I Owe You One, 2019, etc.) much-loved Shopaholic is back—and this time, it’s Christmas.
Becky Brandon is looking forward to spending Christmas with her husband and daughter at her parents’ house, just like always. It’s cozy and warm and, other than her favorite Christmas tradition (shopping), Becky doesn’t have to do much of anything. But then her parents drop a huge surprise—they’re moving to an apartment in the superhip London neighborhood of Shoreditch. Now, instead of Christmas sweaters and carols, they’re into unicycles and avocado toast. Her parents’ transformation into hipsters means that Becky has to host Christmas at her home in Letherby. Becky has no idea how to host a holiday dinner for her entire family and extended network of family friends, but she’s never met a problem she couldn’t shop her way out of. As usual, however, Becky finds herself stuck with a ton of problems. First, she needs to find the perfect gift for her husband, Luke, but in order to get it she just might have to petition an all-male billiards club to accept female members (Becky, of course, doesn’t play billiards). She might be in trouble with the entire country of Norway after creating her own (fictional) version of hygge, “sprygge.” Her environmentally conscious sister wants Becky to decorate a broom instead of a Christmas tree and have a vegan turkey on the table. And then there’s her musician ex-boyfriend who unexpectedly shows up in town with his new girlfriend. With everything on Becky’s plate, will she be able to create the picture-perfect Christmas she dreams of? Becky is still a hardworking, eminently lovable character who just wants to do the right thing, even if she usually screws everything up and finds herself in hilariously awful situations (like, for example, storing 30 pounds of smoked salmon on her front lawn under a duvet).
A laugh-out-loud funny book that will delight longtime Kinsella fans and those looking for a cozy holiday story.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13282-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
A meandering and didactic family saga by Chickasaw poet, novelist, and essayist Hogan (Dwellings, p. 835; Mean Spirit, 1990), a tale that attemptsÖ la Little Big Manto rewrite the history of the American West from a Native American perspective. At 17, Angela Jensen decides that it's time to untangle her family, a process she begins by going hometo a remote village in western Canada called Adam's Rib, a place she no longer even recognizes. Angela looks up Agnes Iron, her great-grandmother, whom she's never met, and is soon introduced to Bush, who looked after Angela's deranged mother, Hannah, and raised Angela herself after Hannah's early death. At first, it is information about her motherstories, accounts, explanationsthat most interests Angela, but eventually she understands that the history of her family is woven tightly into the history of her family's tribe and the bloody strife that has colored their lives ever since the white men came among them: ``For us, hell was cleared forests and killed animals. But for them, hell was this world in all its plenitude.'' The troubles have been carried down to the present day, except that now the threat is comprised not of missionaries and European settlers but of government authorities who want to develop the land out of existence through the construction of a mammoth hydroelectric power plant. As her consciousness is raised, Angela begins to recognize her real identity but desires, and the anger that she labors under throughoutand that finds expression mainly in the crudest caricatures of Western culture and North American history imaginableis relieved by the happy fulfillment of her romantic (rather than political) life: a fairy-tale marriage that seems in this terrain to be even more out-of-place than the dam would have been. Tediously obvious and overwritten; Hogan's characters are so excruciatingly limited to the representation of their cultures that they become little more than allegories, reducing the tale to agitprop.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81227-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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